I hate to say it, but in a lot of cases XP or Vista makes a better print server than LINUX -- I say that only because
LINUX doesn't even have good or sometimes ANY print drivers for various models of printers.
If your inkjet or low end laser printer or whatever doesn't have a foomatic/Gutenprint/etc. driver, LINUX generally won't
be able to serve it very well over the network. There is not generally a universally workable concept of being
able to share the "raw device" I/O so that the *remote client* has to have the printer driver and the server doesn't have
to know much of anything about the printer's capabilities.
In cases where there's a driver for a printer, often it is just an approximately correct driver that prints in some fairly low
resolution and color fidelity compared to what the printer itself supports. For something like a photo printer, typically there
are some fairly important ICC (or non-standard) color profiles and ink limits and dithering / RIP logic embedded in the
Windows/Mac printer drivers to make the printers generate full fidelity output and the settings generally depend on
the selected paper type which itself is profiled in some special way. So if you use a LINUX driver for such a photo printer
to print a color image, you'll perhaps get something that's APPROXIMATELY correct, but chances are the colors will be
notably incorrect, and the image resolution may be poor.
Other things like ink level monitoring may not work depending on the driver and so on.
However for well supported printers, and / or for very casual usages (e.g. text only or text + light graphics) output, it
may be a good solution. Certainly if you have a very intelligent "network" printer or one that speaks Postscript, PCL,
ESC/P, et. al. it may work quite well.
As for selecting a LINUX distribution -- I'd check out the latest SUSE as being a distribution that is usually fairly
up to date in terms of drivers and tool versions. UBUNTU may be a bit hit and miss as to driver support, and you'd probably
have to do more substantial manual configuration of it to get it set up as a good print server.
Fedora 9 or 10 beta isn't so bad, though I suspect SUSE may have more bundled S/W for printing.
Check for LINUX driver support here:
http://www.linuxprinting.org/