CUPS Samba 64bit automatic driver download

The same ease of using Samba hosting for automatic download of the CUPS/Windows Postscript drivers for 32 bit clients can be implemented for 64 bit clients as well.

Brief overview of stuff you already need to know how to do:

1. Your printer needs to be added to CUPS
• generally consists of placing proper PPD files - many available at http://cups.org/ppd.php - in /usr/share/cups/model/ and following the CUPS documentation.
2. Set Samba up properly for CUPS
• See: http://samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/CUPS-printing.html
• Samba usually needs to be reloaded after adding printers to CUPS

OK, let's dive in and do it.

We need the drivers. Some from CUPS, some from your Windows system.

The 32 bit CUPS drivers are available from: http://svn.easysw.com/public/windows/trunk/i386/

The 64 bit CUPS drivers are available from: http://svn.easysw.com/public/windows/trunk/x64/

EDIT: the above links to the CUPS drivers are now dead. A sad day for Linux printing when Apple bought EasySW.

The Windows drivers are on the client systems. We need these files:

• ps5ui.dll
• pscript.hlp
• pscript.ntf
• pscript5.dll

Extract the 32 bit ones from  (a 32 bit system):

• \Windows\System32\spool\drivers\W32X86\PCC\ntprint.inf_<random-stuff>.cab

Extract the 64 bit ones from (a 64 bit system):

• \Windows\System32\spool\drivers\x64\PCC\ntprint.inf_<random-stuff>.cab

Prepare the drivers that we have downloaded.

• They all need to be lower case! You may need to rename the ones from the Windows clients.
• The 64 bit cups6.inf file is not properly "decorated" - see: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888728 we need to fix this:
• http://realcomputerguy.com/files/cups6.inf.x64.patch makes it simple.

Prepare/populate the directories.

• The 32 bit drivers that we have obtained and prepared need to be copied to:
• /usr/share/cups/drivers/
• The 64 bit drivers that we have obtained and prepared need to be copied to:
• /usr/share/cups/drivers/x64/
• Due to cupsaddsmb quirk (lower case "x"), check and "fix", if necessary, the Samba x64 directory:
• ls /var/lib/samba/printers/
• if your distro/installation created an X64 (upper case) instead of an x64 directory symlink to it:
• cd /var/lib/samba/printers
• ln -s X64 x64

Add the printer drivers to Samba.

Now we use cupsaddsmb, which handles all the rpcclient calls, to add the printers to our Samba installation. Simplest is:

• cupsaddsmb -v -a

Read "man cupsaddsmb" for more options.