7–9 Nov 2022
Prague, Czech Republic
Europe/Prague timezone

Save Legacy Printers under Windows with WSL and Printer Applications

7 Nov 2022, 17:40
10m
Ballroom (Hilton Prague)

Ballroom

Hilton Prague

160
Lightning Talk (10 min) Devices Lightning Talks

Speakers

Carlos Nihelton (he/him)
Canonical
Till Kamppeter
OpenPrinting/Canonical

Description

Recording on YouTube

WSL allows to run most Linux applications also under Windows, including Printer Applications.

Printer Applications are the new printer driver format under Linux, daemons which emulate a driverless IPP printer and pass on the jobs to the actual printer. They especially keep legacy printers working which are not driverless by themselves.

As we already have converted all free software classic printer drivers into Printer Applications one can this way print with all printers which work under Linux also under current Windows.

This opens the possibility to keep legacy printers which are abandoned by Microsoft and by their manufacturers working under Windows and saving them from the hungry trash bin.

In this lightning talk we will show that in a few simple steps (no compiling required!) one can put new life into one's old printers again.

Session author bios

Leader of the OpenPrinting project since it was founded in 2001, introduced the CUPS printing system in Mandrake Linux in 2000 working at MandrakeSoft and with this and a lot of evangelism (booths, talks, tutorials) made the other distros also switch to CUPS, since 2006 printing maintainer at Canonical, co-organizing annual meetings with the Printer Working Group (PWG), since 2008 every year mentoring in Google Summer of Code, doing everything to make printing on Linux and alike operating systems "just work".

Level of Difficulty Beginner

Presentation materials