Older printers' support

Posted Jun 6, 2021 9:05 UTC (Sun) by Jonno (subscriber, #49613)
In reply to: Older printers' support by zdzichu
Parent article: Fedora contemplates the driverless printing future

> The other printer is a multifunction HP MFP1132, about 6-8 years old today. According to the proposed change, it should be "driverless". It isn't. I need to manually download "hp-plugin" binary crap every time the driver - hplip - get's updated. Without the binary blob, neither printing nor scanning works.

I got a HP Color LaserJet MFP M281, which has the same problem: hplip requires the proprietary hp-plugin to work. However, using the cups-filter "driverless" driver (and presumably the CUPS "everywhere" driver), I could use IPP Everywhere to talk directly to the printer, bypassing hplip completely. Without hplip SANE won't work, but I just use the controls on the printer to scan, which saves a tiff on my Samba server (it can also save a pdf instead of a tiff, or send the file [pdf or tiff] over email if you prefer that), which works without any drivers.

If you only have one printer on the local network, the following commands should do the trick, if you got multiple printers, you need to manually pick the right URI from the ippfind output:
>$ URI=$(ippfind)
>$ sudo lpadmin -p «PrinterName» -o printer-is-shared=false -v ${URI} -m driverless:${URI} -E