Which Printers Work on Linux?

It's a perennial question: Will this or that piece of hardware or peripheral work on Linux? (This is a question best asked before making the purchase.) In the case of printers, it's pretty easy to answer. You just have to know what to ask... not whom, but rather what.

The place to ask is CUPS. It's the standard print server for Linux and used on other OSs also. Most Linux distros install it by default. To find out if you have it, go to your favorite browser and type in the URL http://127.0.0.1:631/admin (and then bookmark it). If you get an error page from this, perhaps CUPS isn't running on your system. Check that by running service cups status as root. If that command tells you that CUPS is "stopped", then start it up with service cups start. Or, if it says "unrecognized service", then CUPS isn't installed. So install it. You'll need it.

Given that CUPS is installed and running, you should be prompted for a username and password. After entering those, click on Add Printer, enter "test" or whatever you want in the "Name:" field. Skip the "Location:" and "Description:" fields, and click Continue. On the next screen, it doesn't matter what you specify for "Device:" because eventually we're going to cancel out of this printer setup anyway. So just click on Continue again. You can't do the same on the next screen where it asks for the "Device URI"; "socket" won't work, so enter http://hostname:631/ipp/ and click Continue once more.

This gets us to the web page we actually want, a listing of various printer brands, or as the page says, the "Make" of the printer. Scroll down and select the printer you're curious about. And, yes, once again you'll click Continue. The next page to come up asks you for the "Model" of the printer. If you find the model of your printer listed, then CUPS supports it. Otherwise it doesn't, at least not yet... at least not for the version of CUPS you have installed. Once you're done looking, just click on the "Administration" tab at the top or close the web page and all the info you've entered will be discarded. If you inadvertantly click on "Add Printer", click on the "Printers" tab, find the printer you wrongly added, and then delete it.

If you found the printer in question isn't listed in CUPS, there's a few other avenues to try. First, check www.cups.org/ to see if there's a version of cups more recent than yours which might include support for your printer. Alternatively, sometimes a well known or major printer manufacturer will job out the manufacturing of a printer to an unknown printer manufacturer. If the brand of your printer is not listed in CUPS but you know the make and model it sells under from the major brand, then of course you can try configuring that. Finally, you might track down the printer manufacturer and ask them about, or search their website for, a CUPS driver. If they don't have one, let them know that Linux is here to stay and go shopping for a supported printer. Hewlett-Packard (HP) has been onboard with Linux for a long time and has an extensive list of HP-supported printers.