Printing via Wifi at home on an old non-wifi Printer
Imagine that you have an old non-Wifi (and non Etherned capable) printer, and you want to print to that printer via Wifi. You can do so, with GNU/Linux, if you have a wifi network (ADSL with Wifi) at home and several computers using the wifi network from different places at home.
1.1. Computer1 as Printing Server
You need to attach the printer by cable (LPT1, serial) or USB, etc, to one computer, that will act as printing server. In our case, Coprinus laptop with Ubuntu 14.04 GNU/Linux as Operating System.
You have to do two things to set up the system the first time:
1. Select the printer as shared:
"Admin > System > Printers"
Click with the right-click button on the printer icon, and select "Shared"
2. Indicate that the printer shows as shared when someone looks for a printer connected to this computer:
"Admin > System > Printers", then select int he window top menu "Server > Configuration":
And toggle the checkbox saying "Publish the shared printers connected to this system"
Last, you need to know which local IP is using this computer in your local wifi network at home. In order to know that number, open a terminal window and type:
This will tell us some long descritpion of technical details of the internet connection, and from there we will have to find out the IP given to our computer from the Wifi ADSL Router. In our case: 192.168.1.129, and we will use this number in the configuration at the client computers that are willing to print to this printer connected to this computer.
Example from our case as user xavi on computer Coprinus:
You can check that everything is right by means of visiting the Common Unified Printing System (CUPS) interface in your computer acting as printing server, through the web interface that it provides at port 631. This will also show the exact name that the printing queue has in our case. Therefore, let's open an internet browser in this computer and type:
http://localhost:631/printers/
There go to the tab "Printers":
Select the one you have set up in the previous steps "Dell-Dell-2350d-Laser-Printer", where you can see that it says that it's shared ("Compartida"), etc:
In order to allow connections from other computers in the same wifi network, you need to add the ip address to the Listen directive in this file:
Then you have to restart CUPS for the change to take effect, and you will be done with this part:
1.2. Computer 2 to print from
At the client computer (the other one, where we want to print from), you have to go to add a new printer.
And indicate that you will print through "ipp" to the server, to the IP that we found out in the previous step: 192.168.1.129
In order to know the exact name that the printing queue has in our case, we can browse from the client computer to the server at the usual port that the printing system CUPS takes (631):
This will show us the list of printers shared at the computer that works as printer server. In our case, we take the one related to the Dell 2350D Printer that we recently bought as second hand cheap 2-sided laser printer:
http://192.168.1.129:631/printers/Dell-Dell-2350d-Laser-Printer
Therefore, we go to "Admin > System > Printers > Add > Network printer > Internet Printing Protocol (IPP)"
Network:
192.168.1.129:631
Queue:
/printers/Dell-Dell-2350d-Laser-Printer
This makes that you have shown underneath this:
uri: ipp://192.168.1.129:631/printers/Dell-Dell-2350d-Laser-Printer
You check whether that works, and you are done! Enjoy! FLOSS rocks! 
Seed: 
Loading...
Comments