I was walking home yesterday and I just happened to come across an HP LaserJet p2035n sitting by the dumpster, waiting to be taken away. I’ve never owned a printer, but this thing looked like it came from an era when such devices were made to be reliable instead of forcing DRM-locked cartridges, so I picked it up and took it with me. After getting situated I started some online research and I figure this brand of printers was manufactured from about 2008-2012, and my printer has a 2012 date.

As it turns out, this tossed printer works perfectly fine. I plugged it into power and ran a test sheet, and it prints almost perfectly. I plugged it via USB-B into my PC running Fedora 41 and immediately it gets picked up and added as usable printer. I then plugged the printer into its Ethernet port and fortunately this thing is new enough to have Bonjour (i.e. mdns) services so once again my PC just immediately finds it and can print. Awesome!

My laptop is a MacBook. While it did detect the printer over the network, it couldn’t add the printer because it couldn’t find a driver to operate it. I honestly don’t understand why that’s a problem since I assume macOS also uses CUPS just like Linux. But at any rate, I found the solution:

With CUPS on Linux I can share the printer. After configuring firewall-cmd to allow the ipp service now my iPhone and my MacBook can also print to the shared printer using the generic PostScript driver. So, in conclusion, Linux helped me 1) use this printer with no additional effort of installing drivers, 2) share this printer to devices which were not plug-and-play ready, and 3) print pics of Goku and Vegeta. As always, I love Linux.

  • Chris@feddit.ukEnglish
    19·
    4 days ago

    MacOS should use CUPS - I believe Apple developed it or at least did some major work on it.

    • jqubed@lemmy.world
      12·
      4 days ago

      Yes, that is surprising; I’m fairly certain they were involved in developing Bonjour also

      • GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.mlOP
        18·
        4 days ago

        Apple bought and sponsored CUPS, essentially, until they no longer did. That story is very briefly touched on here https://www.phoronix.com/news/Apple-No-More-CUPS

        I don’t know the full history of mdns and zero config networking, but Bonjour is indeed Apple’s implementation of it. In my printer’s web config page it specifically lets me enable/disable Bonjour, so I assume they are using Apple’s implementation. On Linux we have Avahi as a competing piece of software to provide the same service.