Thursday, April 7, 2011

AirPrint for iPad and FC14

I bought a new toy - an iPad 2.

Great toy - having a lot of fun with a device with a good size screen, but portable.  Slowly working out the apps that I require to make it useful.

The other day I thought I should look into printing, and started reading about AirPrint and then I saw the list of AirPrint printers that are supported, the official list only had HP devices, although I have since heard that a number of brother devices also support AirPrint.

After looking around on the web, I found a number of references to setting up a linux machine as an Airprint Server.

Using http://www.micromux.com/2010/11/22/airprint-for-mac-on-linux/ and http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/users/2010-November/387560.html
I started to configure it.

To my surprise it took about 15 minutes, and I can print from my iPad through CUPS on Fedora 14 and out comes a print on my Brother MFC-7420.

I have managed to print images from the photo app, and also anything that I can view in Safari, so it does not seem to have the limitations that Steve found when he posted his information.  So you don't have to race out and buy a new printer, unless of course you want a new printer.

I have now done the same with Fedora 15 -  so simple
  1. Add ServerAlias * to the /etc/cups/cupsd.conf file
  2. Download airprint-generate.py from https://github.com/tjfontaine/airprint-generate
  3. Run airprint-generate.py
  4. Copy resulting files to/etc/avahi/services
  5. Restart cups and  avahi-daemon
2018 - update on airprint

Time to get a new printer, need colour, did some research and price checks, remembered my views on brands just before purchase and go an HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M281dfw
wifi, airprint....  printing from MacOS, IOS, Windows all works great.