On Wed, 17 Nov 2010, James M Pulver wrote:

> I'm not really sure where the right place to ask this question as it 
> touches on so many disparate technologies, but here goes. I'm trying to 
> set up Windows 7 clients to print to printers served from SL5.5 CUPS 
> server using SAMBA to provide windows print sharing. We've got it 
> working with the default CUPS postscript drivers, but it requires Admin 
> on the Windows clients to install the driver.
...

Just to add to what Andrew already said... I look after two samba servers 
which support printing and both are using the CUPS Windows printer drivers 
(hence using cupsaddsmb to get samba to offer them to Windows clients).

On one system which is the 'PDC' for a domain we are using samba-3.0.x (it 
is sl4 so we can't run the newer version).  The windows clients which are 
part of the domain can add printers without needing admin rights - though 
there may be some magic happening to allow this (I know that there _is_ 
some magic I just don't know what it is).  In this case all the clients 
are XP atm...

On another server which is for end-users laptops etc we used to run the 
samba-3.0.x version and that certainly had some problems with Win-7 
clients and would not support 64-bit drivers.

A few months ago we updated that to run sl5 with the samba3x-3.3.x 
packages.  That does support installing 64-bit drivers - and Win-7 clients 
generally seem to work more reliably.

However for this server I *think* that the clients do need admin rights to 
install the drivers which for us isn't a big problem since there are 
users' own machines so they usually will have rights on them (most of them 
seem to run logged in as an admin anyway)...

BTW the CUPS windows 64-bit drivers have not actually been released but it 
isn't hard to find the binaries (they were attached to the cups bug-report 
about the lack of 64-bit drivers).  Google (or other search engines) 
should find them easily enough...

  -- Jon