So, more than three hours later, what have I accomplished? Basically nothing, though not for lack of effort. OpenOffice Impress was crashing every 3 or 4 minutes when I had writer open, so I finally decided (two hours ago) that I'd just print the paper out and use that as my reference when working on the presentation.

Though there may have been strides forward in Linux printing, I can't say I'm in love with the setup process so far. My task: setup a bog-standard HP DeskJet 695C shared via Samba/SMB from Rose's Windows (Win2K) machine via a password-protected user account on that machine (yes, I'm putting in the keywords so that other people in this position can find the post via google).

Gentoo makes it look pretty simple, CUPS was already emerged, so getting that started was just a matter of:

/etc/init.d/cupsd start

and that let me get to the web-based configuration tool (http://localhost:631/). But then I couldn't figure out how to specify the username and password for the printer account for Rosey's machine. I kept following various how-tos that said to use one of:

smb://username:password@workgroup/machine/printer or
smb://username:password@machine/printer

for the printer URI. I eventually stumbled across a post that said the URI format is now:

smb://workgroup/username:password@machine/printer

I wound up doing a restart of cups, just because changing the value through the web interface didn't seem to make it re-attempt connection. That seemed to get me far enough that cups thinks it's logging in, but now the print jobs just abort as soon as they are submitted.

Turning on logging (keep in mind, this just passed the threshold where 90% of users are not going to know how to do this and don't want to learn), it looks as though CUPS is trying to use Foomatic, which I haven't got installed. I thought Foomatic was a competitor to CUPS. Why didn't CUPS just tell me that it couldn't spawn Foomatic anyway? Oh well, emerge -avD foomatic. Rosey's likely going to be upset about it messing up the recording she's doing in the background... sorry Rosey, hazards of having the PVR double as a workstation.

Okay, try printing now. Hmm, now the jobs don't immediately cancel, but they don't print either. Back to the error log. Sigh, now it's failing because it doesn't have hpijs... emerge -avD hpijs.

Now the test page prints.

Now in KDE make it the default printer (I also told KDE to use CUPS as the printing standard instead of LPR). In OpenOffice Writer choose the new printer and tell it to print... finally, printing works!

Annoyance is that the username/password for the Windows account is visible as part of the URL for the printer :( . Suppose I'll create a guest account over there with just printer access to minimise the risk. For now, back to work!