Using shared network printers in Ubuntu

Our home server is a Mac Mini running Ubuntu (yes, this one) with a RAID external disk for backups, and it's also got a printer connected to it. We always wondered why did we have to install drivers in the rest of computers in order to print from them. It was silly: if the server already knows how to communicate with the printer, why can't we just communicate with the server?

Turns out it's just a problem of a checkbox not being set by default. Once it's set, all the shared printers in the network will show up and you can send documents to them from virtually all computers!

First, go to System ⟶ Administration ⟶ Printing. Then choose Server ⟶ Settings. And when you get the following dialog, just check the Show printers shared by other systems checkbox.

If no printer shows up yet, click the Reload button (i.e. the blue round arrow which is more or less under the Group menu option in the screenshot).

And voilà, your shared network printer(s) will appear in the list of available printers. You don't need to Add the printer, since it's shared by the server.

Now you can print from your favourite program in your computer--just select the network printer in the printer dialog. Yay!