Is there a way for driverless printing in Fedora?

Ask Fedora
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1

Hi everyone,

I got a fancy pants new printer from Brother. I think the Linux folk will know that Brother not only provides Linux drivers but also still allows third party toners.

So I got one of those multi-function printers with a printer and scanner (and fax :face_with_peeking_eye: ). Has all the bells and whistles, like Mopria and AirPrint. It also has USB and Ethernet.

I have connected the printer with the driver over Ethernet using the IPP protocol.

Now I am wondering, do I need to install the printer driver on all devices in the year 2026 or is there a way to make use of driverless printing, like mobile phones can do as well. The issue is I do not want to print over WiFi, the WiFi is currently off, as well as the WiFi-direct (Mopria/AirPrint) functionality.

Any advice from people who have some knowledge in this regard to nudge me in the right direction would be appreciated. Thanks all, have a great day.

2

Yes many Brother printers are driverless certified https://mopria.org/certified-products#company6

3

Mopria is WiFi based as far as I understand and I do not want to enable it. Though I am not a 100% sure but I think I figured it out now 20 minutes after making the post.

The CUPS UI in Fedora only gives me options to install various drivers for the printer, but when I visit localhost:631 for the web interface I do see an option to use IPP Everywhere as a driver. I have to test this again but that might be the solution.

4

Hmmm no, without the driver CUPS asks me to provide either a driver or a PPD file, even when I select IPP Everywhere in the menu.

5
6

My Brother printer works great driverlessly (for both printing and scanning) connected over wired Ethernet.

7

It’s not only wireless, for example:

A client uses mDNS to automatically discover a printer through the local 802.11 wireless network. The printer must be connected to the network either wirelessly or with an Ethernet cable. Mopria Print Service also supports printer connection through Wi-Fi Direct.

Did you disable something on the printer?

8

No, WiFi and WiFi-direct are off by default.

I figured out the printing part it seems. There was a network issue and I can successfully add the printer without a driver using the IPP Everywhere option. However the scanner part of the printer does not show up so apparently I can’t scan anything.

Ah ok, I found it in the docs … so you need sane-airscan. Let’s see …

9

Cannon printers have supported AirPrint for years. IPP should work with Airprint until Apple changes Airprint in some fundamental way.

Scanning has had robust network support independent of printing. If there are problems you need to start a new topic with a title that includes scanning and the printer model so it will attract attention of users with the same model.

10

Ah, that was included out of the box for me on the KDE edition. What edition / spin of Fedora are you using, out of curiosity?

11

Check out this wiki page from the Arch project https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/CUPS#AirPrint_and_IPP_Everywhere. Although this is written for Arch in t also applies to Fedora as the cups installation is the same.

Manufacturer provided drivers are often very old and because of the many different Linux distributions, they are obviously not very well tested on all of them.

12

There have been changes to the .ppd spec. With old printers I’ve had to manually revise .ppd files to implement the changes. I assume vendors would prefer that users abandon old printers and purchase newer driverless models.

13

Okay so printing definitely works but I have no luck with driverless scanning.

sane-airscan is installed. All ports to the printer are open. scanimage -L does not find it. If I manually create an entry in /etc/sane.d/airscan.conf the scanning program reports an eSCL scanner but can’t connect to it. My guess is that hardcoding the entry in airscan.conf let it appear without anything checking if it can make a connection. The firewall reports the packet goes to the printer.

14

I never tried this with sane-airscan. I just use the printers panel to send the scanned image via ftp to my computer.

15

I figured it out!

When you boot the printer you have to set an administrator password on the tiny display. The printer actually has a webinterface listening on both HTTP and HTTPS. So when you are logged into the webinterface you quickly see that the printer has network scanning enabled by default but is not listening on any of the eSCL or WSL ports but it is listening simply on port 80.

The following line needed to be added to /etc/sane.d/airscan.conf:

"Brother MFP Scanner" = http://192.168.1.50/eSCL, eSCL

This specific scanner listens on port 80 directly as opposed to other port like 5358 or 9095 as some tutorials would suggest.

Adding this line to the file and then running scanimage -L makes the scanner show up and be actually useable.

Thanks to everyone here, you gave me valuable feedback in a niche I have absolutely no experience in :heart:

16

You probably have mDNS blocked in firewall (firewalld).

Make sure to choose “home” network zone in NetworkManager, and allow mDNS in firewalld configuration for the zone.

You don’t need to edit airscan.conf manually.

17

I am not sure exactly how mDNS works. It’s not blocked in firewalld but the printer is in a different VLAN with a different subnet. The router allows me to access it when I assign firewall rules in the router. However I thought I allowed mDNS in both subnets, mine and the printer’s, and allowed mDNS from both subnets to both subnets, but I still did not manage to find it automatically.

Though I am not too familiar with the mDNS, maybe I am doing something wrong here or maybe mDNS only works in it’s own subnet. Do you know more about this?

18

This deserves a new topic. See https://serverfault.com/questions/121032/forward-mdns-from-one-subnet-to-another#223101 for the reason mDNS isn’t crossing subnets along with some options to work around the issue.

19

Managed switches do support service discovery gateways to overcome such layer 3 boundaries.

20

You don’t need mDNS for driverless printing. You just need that for auto-discovery of the printer.