A while ago, I wrote about my mis­ery try­ing to use a HP PSC 1410 print­er at­tached to a XP box as a net­work print­er.

Ba­si­cal­ly:

• The Lin­ux driv­er freezes the print­­er if you print re­­mote­­ly (but works lo­­cal­­ly)

• The ba­sic win­­dows driv­er will not even in­­stall on a Win­­dowsMe note­­book with 32MB of RAM (says it re­quires 128MB and clos­es)

• The full fea­­tured driv­er re­quires the print­­er to be lo­­cal­­ly con­nec­t­ed to in­­stall suc­ces­­ful­­ly. And if you do that, you can't lat­er tell it that the print­­er is re­­mote (plus it in­­stalls about 600MB of garbage)

Since at­tach­ing the print­er to the lin­ux box and us­ing PS driv­ers was not prac­ti­cal (be­cause it has to be used as a scan­ner too...what­ev­er), I thought... wait a sec­ond. Why not do that on win­dows?

And what the hel­l, it worked.

If you have a rebel can't be net­worked print­er, do this and be sor­ta hap­py. It ex­plains how to cre­ate a Ghostscrip­t-based vir­tu­al print­er that you can share.

And of course, the client PS driv­ers works just fine on any OS. Which means you can use print­ers that, for ex­am­ple, have no Lin­ux driv­ers. Or no Win­dows9x/Me/NT driv­ers.

On­ly prob­lem re­al­ly is that it's a bit slug­gish (it may wait a minute or two be­fore it prints) be­cause the XP box is slow... but it beats copy­ing files.