Network printing HP 840C over Samba

[matthew@sackman.co.uk (Matthew Sackman)]

Hay all.

I've been setting up a linux gateway for a friend who has got a DSL connection
and three windows me boxes in a home network. Everything has gone smoothly
with Debian Woody and a freshly compiled 2.4.4 kernel and data transfer rates
have risen by three fold due to having a linux gateway instead of an Windows
ME gateway.

However, I've had horrible problems setting up network printing. I've got Samba
set up and that is working fine with various shares that I've set up. I've
finally managed to get CUPS set up with the HP 840C, Foomatic + cdj550 which
will print the test page and does so in colour (impressive indeed)!

But, I can not get any of the windows boxes to print to this printer. In my
samba smb.cnf file I have the following:
[global]
   printing = cups

And that's all in the global section. Then:
[printers]
   comment = All Printers
   browseable = no
   guest ok = true
   path = /tmp
   printable = yes
   public = yes
   writable = yes
   create mode = 0700

The cups is set up as a parallel printer URI parallel:/dev/lp0 and there is
no internal firewall. In /etc/printcap I have:
DeskJet:
which is the name of the printer as defined in cups. Now, all the windows boxes
say they can see this printer, but none print successfully to it. I've
downloaded and installed the latest drivers from the HP site and installed them.
Are there any special settings that I should know about? The hp site says that
these drivers arn't designed for network printing but the printer has worked
from a windows box server.

I am desperate here - I can not figure out why this isn't working. CUPS doesn't
even register that the windows clients are trying to send a print job to the
printer, and printing causes samba and cups to freeze on the server, requiring
a restart of those services.

I'm not particularly bothered about using CUPS - if someone has this printer 
(or similar) working successfully under LPRng (or equiv) then I'd be very
grateful to hear about it. I just really need this printer working.

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer me.

Matthew

-- 

Matthew Sackman
Nottingham,
ENGLAND

Using Debian/GNU Linux
Enjoying computing