Printing in Linux seems both rather complete and somewhat hit & miss.  There are several different systems and various collections of drivers.  My method with printing (as with everything in Linux and computers in general) is to stop studying new systems when I find one that does what I need it to do.  So, here are my recommendations.

You need to install CUPS, GHOSTSCRIPT, and FOOMATIC.  Between the group of these programs, you end up with a pretty good graphical system for printing.

One of the weird things about the internet and Linux is that old stuff never dies but new stuff keeps making the old stuff obsolete.  What do I mean?  Well, you can spend a lot of time learning how to implement an earlier system, when there is already a new and better one.  But, since you are not necessarily reading the most current documentation, you won't know that.

The distros seem to add to the confusion.  KDE has its own pretty good printer interface.  Earlier, KDE used the KUPS frontend and also the CUPS web browser based front-end is still available.  Your system may have several such tools installed.

I, of course, have no idea how most of this software works.  As far as I could figure out, many of the actual drivers are in Ghostscript and then are implemented by Foomatic and Cups (and/or other printing systems).  CUPS may be the wave of the future, since it follows the internet standard and you can print long distance over TCP/IP.  Like Windows/XP, this sort of makes faxes obsolete.  Why send a fax when you can simply print to the network printer located in your recipient's office?

At present, I am completely baffled at how to print to Windows printers from my Mandrake install, but Icepack I figured out.  Mandrake seems to have left out the KDEPrinter setup files from its distribution.  I'm not sure, all I know is that I have some KDE systems in Icepack that I don't have in Icepack.  I tried to find the missing programs, but KDE seems to have transitioned to their 3.0 distribution and my installs are running 2.2.

Anyway, you install the printer using one of CUPS/KUPS/KDEPRINTER setup.  If you have the smb backend for CUPS installed (part of SAMBA, but necessarily installed with SAMBA), then your remote Windows printers should be available.

Now, when you print from the KDE graphical programs, you select CUPS and printing works just fine.

StarOffice 5.2:  Star Office initially installs with a generic printer spool, lpp or something.  If you go into the configuration file opt/staroffice/share/xp3/xpdefaults  ["opt/staroffice" will vary, depending upon where you installed StarOffice], under ports, you should put "default_queue=kdprinter" and comment out the existing default_queue.  Now when you print, the kdprinter dialogue will appear and print to your CUPS printers.

Of course, this won't work if you aren't using the KDE desktop.  The basic concept of changing the default_queue designation should work.  There are other systems you could try:  qtcups, xpp, lpr, etc.  There is a command line CUPS interface as well, but I don't know what it is since "kdprinter" works just fine for me.

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