TIL - Linux Printing

Today, I learned about Linux printing, and what a pain it sort of is. Well, technically it’s been an all week ordeal, but today I got it working.

I have a laser brother (black and white) printer, and it’s great because the ink is CRAZY cheap. But, drivers are probably a bit more complicated due to it. None-the-less, Brother has great support for Linux. The issue is, printers just aren’t really that straightforward. Microsoft does a good job of abstracting that away by having a naive user base, forcing print companies to make installation of printers on Windows pretty seamless.

Linux doesn’t have that luxury - atleast not yet. Still, in the case of brother, we have an “installation” script. It doesn’t really seem to work great, atleast not intuitively. I’ll try to loop back in it in the future, but I spent a couple hours fighting with it.

Fortunately, the manual driver install makes it pretty easy, provided you know how to get the IP address from your printer settings.

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