Setting up a Canon Pixma MP530 on Kubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy)

I started tinkering with Rails again on Vista. Boy, is Mongrel ever slow. That's what prompted me to test-drive Kubuntu in the first place. OK, let's try it again. Download the Gutsy image, repartition, reinstall... wow, it Just Works. After a minor bit of fiddling to get the sound card working, I'm up and running on Kubuntu again. Except the printing thing. Complicating the matter, the printer, a Canon Pixma MP530, is shared out from a whitebox PC running Windows XP Home.

After a bit of googling, this is what I did:

1. Following a tip on the OpenPrinting database MP530 page pointing to Brady Hunsaker's advice I downloaded the .rpm MP500 driver files from Canon's FTP site.
2. Installed alien (what a cool name, not to be confused with alien-arena) then I converted the .rpm's to .deb's and installed them.
3. Brady says create symlinks to old library names... but he doesn't explicitly say _where_, for the sake of beginners like me. After a few minutes of noobiness, I realized the symlinks should be in the same directory as the library files to which they point (`/usr/lib/`, not in the printer driver directory `/usr/share/cups/model`).
4. As a test, I plugged the printer directly into a USB port on my laptop then fired up the CUPS server on the default URL http://localhost:631/. No luck, CUPS couldn't see the printer, even after I power-cycled it.
5. I noticed one of the device options is "Windows printer via SAMBA". Hrm...
6. Followed the instructions on Debian and Windows Shared Printing mini-HOWTO to verify that my lappie can connect to the Winbox via smbclient as `smbclient -I WIN.BOX.IP.ADDRESS -L WINBOXNAME -N`.
7. Plugged the MP530 back into the Winbox, then started going through the new printer install, this time for "Windows printer via SAMBA":
1. Add new printer
2. Fill in the name, etc.
3. Device for printer: select Windows printer via SAMBA
4. URI: `smb://WINDOWS.PC.IP.ADDRESS/HOSTNAME/PRINTERNAME`
5. Browse to the PPD file in /usr/share/cups/model/canonmp500.ppd
6. When prompted, enter your Linux username and password (like sudo)
7. Configure and enjoy the printer!

I successfully test-printed a couple of pages duplexed from a PDF, then printed a couple of images to 4x6 photo paper from the cassette tray. Looks like the MP500 driver works just great! Cool!