Printing on Linux
Printing on Linux has sometimes been a nightmare for me. The problem is usually worse depending on the printer you have. For me I have a brother MFC-J4620DW. Today, that nightmare is over.
Today a reddit article popped up about printing with netcat. I had tried setting up my printer with CUPS before but the only lpd print driver available would work with a 32-Bit Linux OS only and had not been updated to 64-bit. I had given up and resorted to sending print jobs to my phone and printing from there.
I gave the netcat trick a go and unsurprisingly it did not work, however I pressed on reading the reddit comments until I got to this gem from user corbet:
It turns out that IPP Everywhere makes almost all of the CUPS misery go away — no more drivers, full control over the printer, etc. For whatever reason, neither the printer vendors nor the distributors emphasize it, though — but Fedora, at least, is thinking about the transition. I wrote an article about my experiences in this area back in June.
I doubtfully went to this article and followed the instructions:
sudo lpadmin -p Laundry -E -v ipp://192.168.11.200/ipp -m everywhere
Then cracked open a pdf and sent it to the printer. To my shock and awe, it printed!