Thursday, July 01, 2010

On a short word: Printing using an LPT port over network

Recently I damaged the JetDirect card of my HP LaserJet 4050, because I accidentally drawed the network cable in the wrong direction, so the plastic cap an the card holding the cap broke off.
As a new card costs about 20-30 Euro, which I as a poor student simply do not have, I had to solve the problem otherwise. I discovered that my desktop computer doesn't have a LPT port anymore, but the laptop does. So I alwas printed using that laptop.
Now I thought, why don't access the printer via network, as the laptop is running all the time? So, to do it as easy as possible I simply installed samba, uncommented some lines in /etc/samba/smb.conf, hacked some 'restart smbd' in the terminal (the Samba start script was switched to upstart) and just selected the now shared printer on my desktop pc (which runs on Win 7 again -.-).
Plus now I can easily exchange files between laptop and desktop pc. Horray!