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Over the past couple years, I've had different USB inkjet printers, Internet connections and computers arranged in a home network LAN. As in the past, one can simply connect a printer to a Mac, install the printer's drivers from its software CD and use Apple's utility to set up a printer. The utility is "Print Center" in Jaguar (MacOS X 10.2) and "Printer Setup Utility" in Panther (MacOS X 10.3). Either is located in Applications:Utilities. In addition, MacOS X uses the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS), which has an administrative Web interface for adding and configuring printers. Note, there is nothing in the MacOS X help system (Help:MacHelp menu in the Finder) on CUPS but the CUPS Web interface does have a help page with documentation on various features and options.
For the greatest flexibility in matching printers and drivers, Panther has Gimp-Print and Ghostscript installed. Jaguar users can download and manually install these utilities. Gimp-Print is a utility that provides print drivers for CUPS. A note on the linuxprinting.org Web site notes that "the system always describes any printer driven by Gimp-Print as a PostScript device... and it requires that a PostScript interpreter (such as ESP Ghostscript) be available to CUPS", i.e., to work with non-PostScript/inkjet printers as well as PostScript printers. Therefore, the two utilities work together to provide printing solutions. Windows has similar Ghostscript utilities to assist in sharing printers across the network.
By the way, I am using these pages as a repository for my notes on configuring these setups (so I don't have to trust my memory.) The links below and on the article pages linked above are resources I used to do the work. The articles incorporate and modify information gathered there with my setup examples and comments.
Rather than have one long article, I broke the notes on my effort into dedicated articles on each printing task or topic.
There are number of handy Web pages as reference for MacOS X printing solutions:
If you are ambitious, and very comfortable working at the command line, check out the Linux documentation sites on printing.
LAN CUPS Printing: All of the computers can print to the Mac-hosted HP printer using CUPS connections. The Macs can print to the Dell Epson printer via CUPS, and the Dell running Windows 2000 can print to its Epson printer directly. A Sony Vaio running XP can print to the Mac's HP but cannot print to the Dell's Epson.
LAN Printer via Print Server Device: In a previous setup. I was able to print in MacOS X from my Powerbook, from RedHat 8.0 and from Windows 2000 on my Dell 600SC to the networked printer. Printing in MacOS Classic unfortunately required a work-around print/saving the file using Acrobat, but I'm a happy camper. While it is tough to find the useful open source solution, now that the MacOS is Unix-based, more of these solutions are available. I found Gimp-Print to be invaluable in providing printing for my two-machine, three OS, LAN setup.