Praise Be CUPS Driverless Printing

Last Tuesday, I finally got to start updating $work's many desktop computers to Debian Buster. I use Puppet to manage them remotely, so major upgrades basically mean reinstalling machines from scratch and running Puppet.

Over the years, the main upgrade hurdle has always been making our very large and very complicated printers work on Debian. Unsurprisingly, the blog posts I have written on that topic are very popular and get me a few 'thank you' emails per month.

I'm very happy to say, thanks to CUPS Driverless Printing (CUPS 2.2.2+), all those trials and tribulations are finally over. Printing on Buster just works. Yes yes, even color booklets printed on 11x17 paper folded in 3 stapled in the middle.

Xerox Altalink C8045 and Canon imageRUNNER ADVANCE C5550i

Although by default the Xerox Altalink C8045 comes with IPP Everywhere enabled, I wasn't able to print in color until I enabled AirPrint. I also had to update the printer to firmware version 101.002.008.27400¹ to make the folding and stapling features more stable.

As for the Canon imageRUNNER ADVANCE C5550i, it seems it doesn't support IPP Everywhere. After enabling AirPrint manually, everything worked perfectly.

Both printers now work wonderfully with all our computers, without the need to resort to strange (and broken) proprietary drivers or aweful 32bit libraries.

Note that if you run a firewall locally, you will need to open port 5353 UDP for machines to resolve .local addresses via mDNS. This had me bumped for a while.

Praises

Packaging CUPS and all the related CUPS bits for Debian isn't an easy task. I'm so glad I don't have to touch that side of CUPS. Three cheers to Didier Raboud, Till Kamppeter and to the Debian Printing Team.

Many, many thanks to Brian Potkin for the work he did to document CUPS Driverless printing and AirPrint on the Debian wiki. If we ever meet, I definitely owe you a pint.

Finally, well, thanks to Apple. (I never thought I'd ever say that)