Printing problem DELL OptiPlex GX260

My experience with Suse and real systems administration is that it bites goat rocks. The Autoyast tools obscure, moddy, and in fact violate the software that they are supposed to manage, including the printing tools, the X manager, the software update system, and the kernel management.

If you possibly can, install a recent RedHat release such as Fedora Core 4 or RH Enterprise 4.2, and use the system-config-printer tool to actually correctly set it up. Then take a look at what the setup did toetc-cups, etc-printcap, etc. and if you're still stuck with SuSE emulate the setup there.

Why do you expect this to work? If the printer is a local device,

See above. Debian stable (where you probably have your 2.4 kernel) is also not reasonably expected to have the latest device drivers and software compatibility.

I still think SuSE 9.3 is asking for trouble in any print server setups. But are the laptop and the server both running the same kernel, the same CUPS version, the same configurations? I thoroughly doubt it: transferring printer configurations from SuSE system to SuSE system is compounded in complexity by the autoyast configuration wrappers, so even if you set things identically in the configuration tools to all appearances you can still have unknown differences under the hood. Autoyast is *BAD* about reporting the details of its software configurations, and even worse about re-writing them unannounced.