Printing from Linux at Lehigh University
If you need to set up a printer on Windows or Mac OS X, you can just go to lehigh.edu/printers and run one of the VisualBasic or applescript scripts, respectively. Here are instructions for Linux. And immediately below is a rant on why you printers are lame.
And you thought CD-ROMs and traditional disk drives were bad enough! It gets worse. I usually never use a printer for economic, environmental, and philosophical reasons. Paper and ink cost money, and printers are big and ugly. On the environmental side, clearly burning through reams of paper is a bad call, as is the entire messy world of ink / toner. Why you wouldn’t just (with the least sophistication) send a PDF is nearly beyond me. Printers are at a level of technology below electromechanical computing, and are contrary to our primary endeavors to increase speed and minimize power (in all walks of life.)
Anyway, sometimes someone asks you for a hard copy of something. This happened to me, and so I had to setup a printer. Printing is free for students at Lehigh, and there is a printer in nearly every building, so at least my economic complaint gets pushed back a few levels to the Bursar, who gets lots of my money, albeit not sacred pocket money.
So, steps to setup a printer at Lehigh with Linux:
- Go to lehigh.edu/printers and proceed with the steps to “install” a printer like you would if you were running Mac OS X.
- Save the install.applescript.
- Make note of the hostname of the printer you’re trying to install. You can get this by running
cat install.applescript | grep DNS= | sed 's/DNS=//' - Once you have cupsd installed and running, go to localhost:631, the cups configuration interface.
- Go to Administration > Add Printer. Everything from here on is fairly intuitive. Just make sure you select “Internet Printing Protocol” from the drop down “Device” list, and when it asks you for the device URI, enter http://the-hostname-you-got-from-above.
That’s about it. Happy printing.