How to share a printer with CUPS and Samba on Linux

You may have read about my recent distro hopping, where I landed with Ubuntu Budgie as my primary operating system. A few days after installing the OS, I realized I’d forgotten that I’d always shared my public folder on my internal network, so I could easily share files between machines (without emailing them or without bouncing them between machines and any cloud service) ).

I quickly realized that Ubuntu Budgie not only did not have a simple means of sharing folders over a network, it also did not include a GUI method for sharing printers. Given that my wife is always printing out knitting patterns, return labels, and other bits of information (and the only printer in the house is connected to my desktop), I had to share that printer, Before that I was inundated with things to print for him.

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Luckily, this isn’t my first rodeo with printer sharing in Linux, so it only took me a few minutes to get it up and running. If you have a similar need, let me show you how easy it is to share printers in your LAN with CUPS (Common Unix Printer Service) and Samba, which provides file and print services between clients on different operating systems .

One thing to keep in mind when doing this — printers can be very finicky, so not every setup will work with every piece of hardware. Just ask any IT admin their opinion about printers and you’ll get the information in no time.

How to share a printer on your LAN from Linux

what you’ll need: The things you will need for this process are a running instance of Linux, a printer that is already connected (and working), and a user with sudo privileges.

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I will be demonstrating on Ubuntu Budgie, which is based on Ubuntu. If you use a different distribution, the only thing you need to change is the order in which Samba is installed. That’s it. let’s get to work.

sudo apt-get install samba -y

sudo systemctl enable --now smb

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

First, look at the line that starts with printing = and change it to:

Next, locate the (Printers) section and make sure it looks like this:

(printers)
   comment = All Printers
   browseable = yes
   path = /var/spool/samba
   printable = yes
   guest ok = yes
   read only = yes
   create mask = 0700

Save and close the file by pressing the Ctrl+x keyboard shortcut.

sudo nano /etc/cups/cupsd.conf

The first line to identify will look like this:

Change localhost to the IP address of the machine hosting the printer (which you can find by running the command IP A,

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Next, you need to set browsing to yes. Find the line:

# Show shared printers on the local network.

Make sure the following is directly below it:

In the same file, look at the section that starts with:

That section should look something like this (be sure to substitute your network’s IP address):

<Location />
  Order allow,deny
  Allow localhost
  Allow 192.168.1.*
</Location>

Save and close the file.

sudo systemctl restart smb

Finally, we need to restart CUPS with the command:

sudo systemctl restart cups

At this point, the printer connected to your Linux machine should be visible on your network. One thing you may need to do is download and install the printer drivers on the machine you plan to print from.

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This action will depend on the printer you use and whether support for that printer is baked into the operating system from which you want to print. If you go to print to a shared printer and find that your OS can see the printer but cannot print, download and install the printer driver and you should be good to go.