If you haven't done the command:

emerge sync

within 24 hours, do that first, then make sure you have cups and samba installed:

emerge -uUDp cups samba

will tell you if you need to install or upgrade anything ... then:

emerge -uUD cups samba

will upgrade/install it.
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Now we need to make cupsd start at every boot, so do this:

rc-update add cupsd default

and we need to start it now, if it isn't already....

/etc/init.d/cupsd restart
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This particular tip is assuming that you need to print to an already working Windows printer on another machine. In my case, it is an HP-3820 already attached to a Windows XP machine.

There are some things you need to know / do about the Windows Printer and the machine it is connected to.

The printer needs to be shared in Windows and you need to know the share name of the printer, the workgroup name of the Windows machine, and a username and password on the windows machine of a user who can use the printer.

In my case:

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Now we need to see if you can see the new computer by name, use the command (you substitute your computer name for johnny1):

ping johnny1

If the result is:

ping: unknown host johnny1

you need to fix your name resolution by adding an entry in the file /etc/hosts that has the name and IP address of the computer you are using ... similar to this:

192.168.0.16 johnny1

Then ping again and if the result is simlar to this (press ctrl-c to stop pinging):

PING johnny1.home.local (192.168.0.16) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from johnny1.home.local (192.168.0.16): icmp_seq=1 ttl=128 time=0.314 ms
64 bytes from johnny1.home.local (192.168.0.16): icmp_seq=2 ttl=128 time=0.179 ms
64 bytes from johnny1.home.local (192.168.0.16): icmp_seq=3 ttl=128 time=0.185 ms

you are good ... if not, resolve the name issues before continuing.

Once the name issues are good, continue
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Now we will add a new printer to gentoo via cups .. the easy way to do this is to open a web browser and type this in the address bar:

http://localhost:631/

Then pick add printer and add the information ... you may need first add cups drivers for your printer ... my printer is in the default install (as HP DeskJet).

The only real tricky part is the URI ... which should be:

smb://username:password@home/johnny1/deskjet3820
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If you use gnome ... you can also do:

emerge -UuD gnome-cups-manager

and use the program:

gnome-cups-manager to add your samba network printer to gentoo.