Network Printing

[David Curry <dsccable comcast net>]

Greetings everyone.

After years of resistance, I recently capitulated to the demands of the 
wife for a windows laptop (started biting nails and gnashing teeth 
almost immediately when the damn thing went into hibernation mode and 
would not subsequently even turn on).  But, I digress.

Despite having used linux since Redhat 4.1, my desktop pc has never been 
part of a local area network.  Now I need to do just that with the lan 
consisting of a netgear WGR614v5 router, my desktop system running FC2, 
the Windows XP home Laptop, and a network printer for joint use of my pc 
and the laptop.  The printer is currently connected directly to my 
desktop system, but otherwise the network is up and running with 
wireless connections through a secure mode (WPA-PSK).

O'Reilly's Linux Cookbook, chapter 14, tells me that using my desktop 
system as a printer-server running CUPS I should be able to share 
printers with a Windows PC.  That is, I should not need to run samba as 
well as cups.  Presently, two printers are connected directly to my 
desktop - an HP laserjet and an HP multifunction 
copier/fax/printer/scanner.  What I think I would like to do is connect 
the multifunction machine directly to the netgear router for network use 
and keep the laserjet connected directly to the desktop.

Questions I would like to pose are:
1.  Will my desktop be able to function as the print server for a 
"remote" printer connected to it through a rounter?
2.  Would moving the multifunction machine to the router necessarily 
result in loss of its scanning capabilities?

Suggestions/thoughts on the lan arrangement would be appreciated.

Dave Curry