On clients use generic driver for printer shared by CUPS
- by Daniel
I know this worked really easy with a recent CUPS version some years ago. Unfortunately I fail to do the following with latest CUPS nowadays. How to share a printer without using printer specific drivers on the clients with CUPS?
The printer is a Samsung ML-2010. The important fact is that it needs a quite specific library for printing called splix. That is installed on the server and prints well.
What makes trouble is using that printer over the network. I found out how to use Avahi under Linux to make use of DNSSD to advertise and discover printers. But as far as I understand the new CUPS offers the internal driver interface on the network. This has 2 major issues:
anybody can fiddle with the driver and I don't trust any uncommon printer library to be "network secure"
anyone who wants to use my printer including guests needs to install the specific drivers first
I remember the old days when I could enable "Share this printer" on the CUPS server and all clients would magically detect the printer and just send their job data to the server and have it do the driver stuff.
After everything a read I guess this is related to the changes Apple introduced with CUPS including dropping of the integrated network discovery protocol.
If it helps:
Server: Ubuntu LTS 12.04 Server with CUPS 1.5.3
Client: Arch Linux with current CUPS 1.6.1
On another box with Ubuntu the printer was setup automatically at least but the mechanism used the Splix library for that.
