I still have my Ubuntu Linux machine with a printer hooked up and I thought that it would be a good idea to setup the new MacBook Pro to print on that printer via Cups and that, in theory, it should be possible. In fact, that’s really what Cups is for! However, I have little luck with printers so I didn’t get my hopes up. And, naturally, it was harder than it should have been.

First you have to set permissions on the Linux machine so other machines. That was easy — I just added Allow from 192.168.1.* to my /etc/cups/cupsd.conf.

The next part wasn’t so easy. This page was a major help, and I ended up doing both things. However, that page describes what you need to do, not why you need to do it. What happens is that the DeviceURI that Cups on OSX refers to is ipp://machineIP/ipp/queue name while my Ubuntu machine refers to it’s print queues as ipp://machineIP/printers/queuename. There isn’t a way to do this in OSX besides editing the /etc/cups/printers.conf directly. Once you make both the Cups on OSX point to the device on the Linux side, things start working.

It took me a week to figure this out! I hate printers — have I said that before?