Saturday, August 26, 2017

Printing from Windows and Android on a "classic printer" attached to USB on Ubuntu

I use a ten-year-old computer running Ubuntu 14.04 as a print server for the house, and it does a little bit of file-serving as well.  I don't want to burden it with any other heavy applications, because it can't take it.

It serves the printer using CUPS.

I gave it a static IP address (192.168.1.x) on the domestic network and then I could easily install it as the default printer for all the Linux and Windows machines we have.

The Android devices (phones and tablets) were more of a problem.  Google Cloud Print would work, but required me to run Chrome on the server, and Chrome is heavy. The solution I settled on was to use the app Let's Print Droid. This finds the CUPS server easily and sets itself up.  I can then 'share' in any app that allows that, and select Let's Print Droid.



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