Using a Driverless Printer on Debian (Without Avahi) (Shallow Thoughts)

Using a Driverless Printer on Debian (Without Avahi)

It's nice to be back on a relatively minimal Debian install, instead of Ubuntu-with-everything. But one thing that I have to admit I appreciated about Ubuntu: printing "just worked". Turn on a printer, call up the print menu in any app, and the printer I turned on would be there in the menu, without any need of struggling with CUPS configurations.

Ubuntu was using Avahi, the Linux version of Apple's Zeroconf/Bonjour framework, to discover printers. I knew that I'd probably need to install Avahi if I wanted easy printer configuration on Debian. But as it turned out, getting printing working was both harder, and easier.

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