OC by: @GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml

I was walking home yesterday and I just happened to come across an HP LaserJet p2035n sitting by the dumpster, waiting to be taken away. I’ve never owned a printer, but this thing looked like it came from an era when such devices were made to be reliable instead of forcing DRM-locked cartridges, so I picked it up and took it with me. After getting situated I started some online research and I figure this brand of printers was manufactured from about 2008-2012, and my printer has a 2012 date.

As it turns out, this tossed printer works perfectly fine. I plugged it into power and ran a test sheet, and it prints almost perfectly. I plugged it via USB-B into my PC running Fedora 41 and immediately it gets picked up and added as usable printer. I then plugged the printer into its Ethernet port and fortunately this thing is new enough to have Bonjour (i.e. mdns) services so once again my PC just immediately finds it and can print. Awesome!

My laptop is a MacBook. While it did detect the printer over the network, it couldn’t add the printer because it couldn’t find a driver to operate it. I honestly don’t understand why that’s a problem since I assume macOS also uses CUPS just like Linux. But at any rate, I found the solution:

With CUPS on Linux I can share the printer. After configuring firewall-cmd to allow the ipp service now my iPhone and my MacBook can also print to the shared printer using the generic PostScript driver. So, in conclusion, Linux helped me 1) use this printer with no additional effort of installing drivers, 2) share this printer to devices which were not plug-and-play ready, and 3) print pics of Goku and Vegeta. As always, I love Linux.

Seems unfair to not share what I’ve been printing! Plus some status/config pages and I ran a few tests to see how I can manually duplex print (odds then evens on the back). I only have a few sheets of printer paper so I’ve been running them through again and again 😆

  • just_another_person@lemmy.world
    23·
    2 days ago

    I will tell this to anyone on any OS who ends up here without a free printer: Brother printers.

    Every damn time. Work flawlessly on any platform, and last for decades. I’ve still got a Brother laser from 2002 that works perfectly fine, and I’ve never had to perform any major work on it.

    • who@feddit.orgEnglish
      5·
      2 days ago

      I’ve seen fewer failures in their stand-alone laser printers than their all-in-one printer/scanners, but yeah, I second Brother.

    • Jtskywalker@lemm.ee
      2·
      2 days ago

      Only issue I’ve had with mine is double sided printing not working by default in Debian, just had to install the brother driver, which was easy enough