I have a printer-scanner-device that is dumb. It does not have any smart features or networking abilities. The manufacturer, Brother, offers drivers as a *.rpm or *.deb package.
I though about setting up a CUPS print server to make the printer available in the network. The problem I am currently facing however is, that any device that wants to use the printer need the drivers installed, and none of my Linux machines use the package format provided. I can also not Install those drivers on my mobile phone.
Is there a way to create a print server using CUPS, that accepts print jobs without the need to install drivers on the clients sending jobs to the server?
It’s very much possible to do so, you can install CUPS on a VM, Container or Raspberry Pi connected to the Printer via USB running a Distro that is compatible with Drivers for it.
This is a Guide I found which seems to accomplish what you want, maybe have a look at it:
OK people, I setup the print server as explained in the article. However it does not explain the most important part, the client setup. Because the CUPS client (not the server) as well as the Windows client both ask to select a manufacturer/model based on a very limited list. Selecting the Generic Postscript driver on the Linux client results in no prints. What do I have to do here?
You should be able to print postscript, PDF, text, several common image formats, etc to CUPS without problems. It’s true that RAW should mostly work on Linux, too, because Linux applications output to postscript or PDF for printing, anyways. You’ll have problems with Windows clients, though.
There’s no reason it shouldn’t work. You might want to look into /var/log/cups/ to see why nothing came out. lpstat -W all -o will show you the past 500 print jobs.
