Hello, so I am off to college soon and was hoping to take an old printer of my aunt’s. Obviously I cannot use it wirelessly but I have a cord and everything. However, I cannot seem to figure out how to download the drivers. In settings, it recognizes the printer and I get to the point where it asks me for the model at which point I can’t find it. It doesn’t seem to have a .ppd file, in other words.
I have CUPS and gutenprint and I have tried downloading from Canon’s website and using debtap to get from there (which wouldn’t let me get past debtap -u) and even building my own package (which in fairness I used chatGPT to do so it may not have worked correctly) but I am now out of answers. I am a man without answers.
So if anyone has any suggestions or ideas (whether it be software or hell even witchcraft) to get this useless-piece-of-sh** printer to work I would greatly appreciate it. Printing at my University is like $0.20 a sheet so I would love to have an alternative.
Here is my system info:
Operating System: EndeavourOS
KDE Plasma Version: 6.4.3
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.16.0
Qt Version: 6.9.1
Kernel Version: 6.15.6-arch1-1 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 8 × Intel® Core™ Ultra 7 258V
Memory: 34 GB of RAM (33.1 GB usable)
Graphics Processor: Intel® Graphics
Manufacturer: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC.
Product Name: ASUS Zenbook S 14 UX5406SA_UX5406SA
System Version: 1.0
And please let me know if there is any more information you need.
You could open the CUPS GUI via http://localhost:631/ and switch to the admin tap. There you’ll find the options to either add a printer manually or to search for available devices. I would suggest to connected via usb at first and then you could try to figure out the wireless options.
Some (most) of the printers don’t need driver nowadays to work, connect the printer and go to System Settings and there to Printers tab and see if it finds your printer.
I forgot this. If you use your own network, you can also switch to “Home” profile in Firewall settings (it’s open there by default and it helped me installing our new wireless printer).
THIS! I hadn’t originally thought to use this because I figured what was in KDE settings was an application GUI version of it, but the website also found the correct model for me, which was a “4700 series” instead of my exact printer.
I then had to reinstall cups and every dependency but that was for a separate issue.