The Imprints project provides mechanisms for building, locating, and installing special printer driver packages that install the files necessary for a Samba server to give a printer driver to Windows client machines. This document describes how to use the package construction tool, mkprintpkg.pl, to build Samba printing packages.
At their core, the Samba printing packages generated by the Imprints project are no more than regular gzip-compressed tar files with a particular file layout. The package contains all of the files that Samba will need to make available to Windows client systems along with some extra configuration information that is passed to Samba by the Imprints package installer. Due to the differences between Windows 95/98 and Windows NT, a single printer driver does not exist for both platforms. Instead, the package format allows a printer driver to be stored for each distinct Windows architecture whether it be Windows 95/98, Windows NT X86, or Windows NT Alpha. (Architecture in this sense means not only a difference in CPU architecture but also the OS itself.)
There are three main steps in building a Samba printing package are:
Download and prepare the vendor printer drivers.
Invoke the package creation tool with the correct options.
Install the package onto a Samba server or place the package onto an Imprints retrieval server.
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| Preparing Vendor Drivers |