Installing Printers in Linux | CUPS, Printing, and Scanning

in this video I'm going over installing a printer in Linux and then also utilizing the cup service so any UNIX based system and Windows based system can connect to that printer either through your Linux or Mac OS system so first off let's go ahead and discuss what cups is see ups common UNIX printing service so with that out of the way that means Mac OS and Linux pretty much used the same service and for the most part that's true however there are some big distinguishers here that I want to just get out of the gate so running cups and installing the printer using cups acts as a print server what that means is all the computers around your computer and your computer itself can utilize that service to print to your printer which is pretty awesome and a lot of people and I've set it up in many businesses that utilize this also fantastic so why does printing suck in Linux well so many people are so used to just going to the printer download website and hitting download this specific driver for that model and then running it and they have all these fancy tools to do like scanning and faxing and all these things multifunction printers do well that just really isn't flushed out very well in Linux depending on the manufacturer some it's pretty decent like HP some just kind of suck like Canon printers and certain Epson printers also are kind of a nightmare to deal with so it just depends on what you got and by no means am I saying HP's perfect because there's HP printers that don't work for crap either and that's why down in the description I listed a whole bunch of references so you can go and find your printer now I recommend using at least two or three of these sites to go there's no definitive compatibility list because open printers doric which is probably the most well-known one doesn't even have my printer that the cat is sitting on back here but it works great so once you get this service installed you're able to print to it what about the other functions well that's when like HP Lib comes in and I go the link down in the description below as well and you install this to get much of the other functionality that you want from your system or printer it's just again mileage will vary depending on the printer some of them just aren't very compatible especially the lower end multifunction printers have less compatibility than your higher-end printers and also that's not to say that Linux drivers or Linux specific things don't exist such as I think Xerox has written some Linux based drivers that work decent to where you'll have more of that fancy interface when going to print in a Linux system however this is more on the high end of printing this is your printers that cost tens of thousands of dollars and sit in your business not so much for your home users so I'm not going to be mentioning much of that today I do want to go ahead and just clarify it there are certain Linux drivers but for the most part home users and home printers have a little bit of a struggle here and you know I'm not gonna deny individual multifunction printers in Linux isn't ideal by any means but with all that said let's go ahead and jump into cups installed and then also utilizing cups and adding your printer okay to start out with here let's go ahead and install a cup service so we can provide printing support across our whole home network and also our home PC so we'll do sudo apt installed cups or if you're using a different package Menard cups is pretty much standard across the board once it's done then you just need to enable a service just doing sudo system control enable cups and then just do system control start cups with this done you've enabled and started the cup service and we can now exit our terminal once cups we just simply launched in localhost colon six three one is the cup sport with that we can easily add our printer by just going add printers and printers and then this limply selecting your printer out of your list here locally installed printer so if you're using you USB printer it's going to be local if you're using a network attached printer obviously network attached let's say I wanted to use my network attached printer I'll just go ahead and hit continue please note remember cups is specifically for printing not scanning and other things so with this I would do this and say I want to share this printer with other people using this computer so we'll hit continue and then you can use the driverless driver out of here however I don't like to do that I like to make sure it's not already in the model deal and if you scroll through here I'll be able to find it other things if you have a PPD file that you want to mainly load that driver you can actually choose the file and do it here and then simply click Add Printer I've already added this printer so we're gonna go over to printers and see the After Effects now I used the PostScript driver which if you're installing a printer I always recommend PostScript instead of like PCL 5 or PCL 6 just because you're gonna have better performance and better compatibility so with this we can load up our documents print directly to our print server here and you know if I'm on a Windows machine or a Mac machine it doesn't matter if this computer is on I know I can print directly to it and it will reroute all my print jobs to my prints my printer back there which is awesome so hey there is cups in a quick breakdown if you want to know more about cups definitely check out all the how-to guides right here at the home it really breaks down all the different things you can do in cups but I just wanted to show you the nitty gritty just to get you going so with cups out of the way what if we want to do faxing and scanning and all these other things that a multifunction printer would do well I'm using an HP printer so let's go ahead and show you HP lib so with printing out of the way I didn't touch really on skin scanning which is part of that HP Lib thing I just mentioned it doesn't work very well almost across the board sadly to say I haven't found much success here I've even had to trick and run services and do a lot of hacky workarounds I know my mother-in-law she wanted to utilize her scanner and she had a document feeder much like the printer back here and you'd put a stack of papers in there and a lot of times it would just scan the first paper into like a PDF and then it would just omit the rest of the stack which was super aggravating I spent several hours on this and she was using a brother printer at the time for this so I know I'm a HP I do have a lot better result where I am able to skin a stack just know that you will have a you know mileage will vary when it comes to scanning it's not great and I'm not gonna sugarcoat it and tell you hey everything works because it really doesn't when it comes to this aspect of a printers omelette now HDHP lip is actually meant for an all-in-one you just click download here it downloads adopt run file with it downloaded do you need to go into your terminal so let's go back to our terminal here we'll go into our downloads and if we do a listing you'll see HP lip dot run make sure you chmod plus x HP lip dot run with this it makes it executable so we can do the next command which is dot forward slash HP lip run and enter now I'm using an experimental build of Debian which is using CID which is above testing so there's gonna be some incompatibility so if you're using an LTS version of pretty much any distro you're gonna be just fine so with this I'm gonna go ahead and hit yes and then do I want automatic custom or q4 quit now if you saw an air in here I highly recommend doing custom which I see an error I know this is gonna fail out because I'm using such an experimental version of Debian but if I was using like Debbie and stretch 9 I know I could probably do automatic and it would just set it all up for me as long as I just followed the problem but let's go ahead and do custom for this install so let's say yes is this correct one it is do you would you like to install custom discrete drivers or class drivers I like to do discrete drivers and you can select HP lip options to enable do I want to do that yes graphic user interface QT for I know there's QT for issues with this specific thing so I want to hit no that means I won't get any graphic user interfaces sadface QT 5 I know that is installed so let's see if we can't install QT 5 and then pc s-- in fact support no I don't use faxes scanning support yes and then documentation yes as well then we simply enter our password and let's go ahead and hit enter for continue app armor is detected if you're on Debian or pretty much any other system and you have a farmer it'll tell that and it'll make a profile for you you want this if you're on rel or Fedora those types of ones use SELinux and I believe it can also make profiles for it so I'll say hey missing dependencies do you want to install these yes and we'll go ahead and hit yes to this as well says there's re an older version of HP lip installed in here I want to remove and install this version so we'll put I all right so it just finished the uninstallation that took a little bit of time actually I took about five to ten minutes and now we are actually going through in doing the full install of HP lip all right here we go moment of truth install and build is done now it's doing it so you want to check for HP lip updates I'm gonna go no I don't like updates HP plugins need to be installing updated do you want to install plugins yes let's go ahead and do GUI mode if I completely got rid of all my QT installs then I probably should do the interactive mode and not GUI but let's go ahead and do GUI lets live on the wild side here so let's go ahead and hit next so I got an error saying it can't contact the key server do you want to still install the program just yes you're just not validating it so we're just gonna go ahead and install it and agree with this we need to install a proprietary plugin please enter the password and root so we'll do that plug-in install successful now would you want to read restart a replug I'm gonna say restart because it's a network printer so restart so with this it should be installed we probably need to do a reboot here so we'll just do sudo reboot so right now I'm having a bug where it's downloading and installing the HP plugin using HP - plug-in or HP - setup to set up the device even though my device is supported it has the both the scanning and faxing capabilities from linux and i'm doing it all from HP lib guess what it's still not working we have a bug in this at least from my version i'm sure if i was on an LTS version this worked just fine but again this is just some of the things you get when you're on the bleeding edge so to speak there's not much I can do here I pretty much just have to resign in fact I'm just gonna use it as a printer and not the scanning function if I want scanning I'll use a different computer here at the house this is mainly just my production machine anyways I'm not really taking scans into it so not that big a deal but just know you may experience crap like this that you're saying on the screen if you're on like a rolling release or the leading edge in Linux because a lot of these packages just aren't tested all that well especially with the bleeding edge or the latest and greatest so obviously in businesses you're running LTS releases and older releases typically so it's not that big of a deal but since this is where we're at and you're a home user just know yeah you might run into this if you're on the latest and greatest so with that done I'm leaving this here I'm done for the night I've spent probably a good hour trying to hack around get the scanning functionality to work and I'm throwing in the towel I'm running on running on this experimental version of Debian and it's just not really meant to work on experimental versions of Debian or rolling releases in many instances and I just have to accept that or go to an LTS release of Linux which I'm not gonna do so there we go printing in Linux and all of its horrible glory but with all that said let me know what your thoughts are down in the comments what did I get wrong because honestly printing in Linux is so complex and there's a lot of things that go into it honestly I really like just using the cup service utilizing the print functionality out of it because it is a very very good universal thing where you can get printing working on almost every printer out there I've yet to run it in a printer I couldn't actually get printing I have had issues with multi functions as I've already gone into in depth but other than that you know hey printing in Linux is easy just some of the multifunction features is not but with all that I've said a big shout out to my patrons without you these videos wouldn't be made and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Chris Titus Tech

Views: 116,837

Rating: 4.7652812 out of 5

Keywords: chris titus tech, linux, printer, install a network printter in linux mint 18.2, printer (computer peripheral class), installing an hp printer in ubuntu 15.04, printer in linux, printer problems in linux, hp printer, how to connect to a network printer in linux mint 18.2, install printer linux, setting printer di linux, installing an hp scanner in ubuntu 15.04, installing hplip in ubuntu 15.04, cups printing, scanning in linux, how to print in linux, installing printers in linux

Id: En2DJAMpwmY

Length: 15min 10sec (910 seconds)

Published: Tue May 21 2019