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by juancn 72 days ago
Thank you, loved this and it made me "duh!".

I have an old-ish Samsung laser printer that works perfectly and a Linux file server at home and the printer no longer supports AirPrint.

I never thought about using the Linux box as an AirPrint server! This will free me from all the odd print requests from my kids! (probably)

3 comments

Been doing something similar with a Samsung printer and CUPS for years, it’s great

Found this helpful for generating some of the config files: https://github.com/tjfontaine/airprint-generate

It’ll work great if you can get the drivers all aligned properly. I’ve tried a few times to get my 12 year old Brother laser setup like that, and each time I end up throwing in the towel.

Maybe I’ll try it again someday with an LLM assisting.

CUPS just worked, it even supports AirPrint natively now. Thankfully my printer supports IPP (it's an all in one office type), so I didn't have to do much other than install a couple packages, add the printer and configure the default paper size.
I have a Samsung ML-1740 kicking around still that I just can't bear to part with; I've been meaning forever to RasPi-ify it, but it's one of those projects that feels like it's going to end up being a rabbit hole.
>but it's one of those projects that feels like it's going to end up being a rabbit hole.

I know your feelings. I've started https://printserver.ink because I wanted to buy a retail print server and could not find any. I was expecting half a year overall work for everything, but fixing all printer-related bugs for 3 years already.

Ah nice. If I supply my own raspi zero 2W, can I buy just a software license from you? Doing the software integration is the part I'm least looking forward to. :(
Unfortunately the firmware supports only Orange Pi Zero3. It's a hardware+software solution, because to make reliable print server, you have to control both and fix SoC/board specific bugs.

For example, USB 1.1 OHCI has too high latency to work with my old printer, and needs a kernel patch: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-usb/3fe845b9-1328-4b40-8b02-61...

Greg does not accept my patch and does not reply to me, presumably because I'm Russian and he doesn't want legal consequences.

Raspberry Pi unfortunately have quite list of USB hub bugs and Wi-Fi module bugs (according to their GitHub and reports all over the Internet), and I'm not familiar with it and don't know how to fix. That's why I don't make generic firmware or container images, and stick only to my board which I know from start to end.

ML-1740 is supported by the driver available here: https://www.bchemnet.com/suldr/index.html Works on my arm64 sbc as a cups printer for another samsung printer
It's a Samsung SPL device, it's supported by SpliX: https://github.com/OpenPrinting/splix
Yup, I used splix with it for years on Mac, so I think that will be the way to go.