Project: To get my daughters Win 7 Laptops (1 x 32bit, 1 x 64bit) to be able to print to the Canon i865 attached to my Mageia # 3 Desktop (connected to my desktop via USB).
I did a whole lot of reading about how to get my trusty old Canon i865 installed on my daughters Win 7 Laptops and how to get printers shared between Linux and Windows 7 on a network (most referring to Ubuntu, Mint or other distros). I wanted to set the laptops up to be able to print to the Canon i865 over the network. I found lots of threads advocating using SAMBA, CUPS, IPP - all confusing. I did actually install SAMBA but didn't do anything with it. So in the end I asked on a Microsoft forum and got a sort-of answer.
So, first of all, in MCC, I enabled the printer as "Shared".
Then from my daughter's laptops I was finally able to detect the Canon printer attached to my Desktop under Windows 7 "Add Printer" dialogue searching for a network printer and Windows searched for and installed the driver. I was then able to print a test page successfully. This was the same for both laptops. Actually there were some anomalies on Windows in behaviour, but the end result was the same - a successful test print to the Canon printer on my Mageia Desktop.
So, to the problem: Last night I went to print a document on my Mageia Desktop and it would not print at all! In the queue the document was in a status of "processing". This was the first time I had tried to print from my Desktop to the - now shared - printer, since setting it up to - what I mistakenly thought - was a successful network sharing arrangement. After much mucking around, I deleted the Canon i865 networked printer on my daughter's laptops and un-shared the printer in Mageia. Still the document wouldn't print. I re-booted, finally back to normal, no shared printer and the document would print.
I just tested this again by installing the printer again on one of my daughter's Win 7 laptops, did a successful test print. Then from my Desktop I tried to print - no go, same result as before - status of "processing". Sent another test print from Win 7 laptop - in the queue as "pending" behind my Mageia print. Had to delete printer on Win 7 again, un-share printer on Mageia and re-boot to be able to print from my Desktop again.
What is going on? What am I not enabling/installing, doing incorrectly? I was so happy on Friday that I finally had it working and that I hadn't had to resort to asking you good people for help. But now all that has changed and I do have to ask you much more learned people for any assistance you might give be able to me.
