Re: Samba for scanner?
On Wed, 2003-04-09 at 01:57, Joerg Johannes wrote:
> Hi Michael
>
> > What set up would you recommend? Can I share a scanner from Linux? I
> > have not been able to find any information on this. I am hoping that
> > there is something like raw access through Samba for printing so that
> > windows can use its own drivers.
You have three main options; connect the device to a linux box and share
it from there to the windoze boxes, connect the device to a windoze box
and share it to the linux boxes, or connect the device to a dual boot
box and use/share/boot from both OS's as you need to. There is another
option which is to connect it to a linux box running windows in vmware,
and use/share it from both OS's that way.
Connecting and using/sharing it from a Linux box is highly dependant on
whether you can use it at all from Linux. Each bit of functionality
needs to be considered independently.
Fax: hylafax or mgetty-fax to send/receive faxes. hylafax is probably
more powerful, with windows and linux clients. mgetty-fax is smaller and
you can use things like lprng-fax to fax from windoze clients as if it
was a samba printer. I think both assume the fax is a serial device, but
there are probably ways to make them work with USB devices.
Printer: this is kind of the easy part, but it does depend on suitable
printer support from something like ghostscript or magicfilter. Once you
have an lpr daemon of some sort working, you can share to windows boxes
using samba. The standard samba+lpr+magic-filter combo allows you to
configure the windows boxes to use either the printers windoze drivers
(the data gets passed strait through), or a generic postscript printer
(the data gets recognised as postscript and fed through ghostscript).
Scanner: SANE... you will need to make sure the device is supported by
sane. SANE let you use the device remotely from other linux boxes. There
are windows TWAIN drivers for SANE, but last I looked they were very
beta and not actively developed. I think there are also some other SANE
windows clients, but because they are not TWAIN, they are unlikely to
integrate nicely with windows apps. Note that I don't think it is
possible to use scanner connected to a windows box remotely, so even
though Linux is weak in this area, it is still ahead of windoze.
My choice would be to use Linux as the server for the device, then share
it out from there. However, I doubt you will find much Linux support for
these multifunction devices. I would shop around and research like crazy
before buying anything, and pay extra if necessary for a Linux supported
device. I think I would end up buying separate scanner, printer, modem
devices just so that they all work with Linux (and would probably be
better and be cheaper).
If you do find something that works with Linux, please let us all know.
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Donovan Baarda http://minkirri.apana.org.au/~abo/
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