I once saw a cheap ($170) new laser printer at Staples (HP LaserJet P1102w)which connected to a home wifi and shared itself with everyone in the house. At first this reminded me of a former room mate, but then got me to thinking about building a print server from an old PC I had laying around. Had I used the same hours mowing lawns, I'm sure I would have come out ahead. However, to help others through the process (both the decision making process and the technical process), I'm documenting my journey here.
To speed things up, I uncommented the "cdrom" lines in /etc/apt/sources.list and popped in the Alternate CD (don't forget to tell BIOS not to boot off the CD anymore, and also don't forget to mount it correctly: sudo mount /dev/cdrom /cdrom). I then did a simple sudo apt-get install cups which installed flawlessly.
Cast of Character
The PC
- Pentium 1, 170MHz
- 64MB RAM
- 3.2GB HDD
The Printer
Samsung ML-1740 - a black & white laser printer with lackluster Mac OS X support
The Scanner
HP SCSI ScanJet 5p - pretty sure it works...
The WiFi
Buffalo USB AirStation G54 (WLI2-USB2-G52). As a backup, I also have a PCI WiFi card somewhere.
The Goals
Needless to say, this didn't play out into an efficient story. Prior to starting I removed the sound card and modem (both ISA) from the PC and added in a PCI Network card. Though installing from a CD, most linux distros play nicest when they have an internet connection during setup. Ideally, I would have used the WiFi device for this, but USB WiFI networking has historically been a troublesome.
The OS
Ubuntu is my first choice only because I have experience with it and it's well documented. I started by grabbing the latest 12.04 Server CD because:
- Latest = Greatest
- Server = text only
I was wrong on both counts. Ubuntu dropped support for older CPUs like mine after 10.04 (trying to install 11.x or 12.x resulted in errors about missing instruction sets). When I tried 10.04 Server, it took forever and sit for 10's of hours installing (hung at "Storing language..."). It turns out even though I'm creating a print "server", I shouldn't use the Server CD because it has a lot of other server packages I don't need.
In researching other options, I came up with this list:
I couldn't get this to install as it would hang on screens showing no progress bar for hours - sometimes over night. It appears that this installer is minimal in that the CD has minimal data on it (and therefore needs an internet connection to download a LOT of data during installation) rather than simply installing a bare-bones minimal OS. After about 8 tries at this I gave up (even using the manual/expert installer didn't help much)
DSL
Other users reported getting both CUPS and SANE working with Damn Small Linux. I got it installed without any problems (has a GUI even!). However, the deal breakers were:
- It wouldn't enable APT so there was no way for me to add the CUPS and SANE packages (perhaps DSL is stale? It should use Debian repositories, but trying to enable APT resulted in 404 Not Found errors)
- It's not made to be installed to HDD, but rather run from a flash drive etc. It recommends a normal Debian (or Bonsai) installation.
Since it wasn't going smoothly and since I preferred to stay in charted territory (Ubuntu) I gave up on this option.
Network Print Server
I didn't end up trying this option because of these limits stated in the documentation:
- No USB printers - only Parallel Port (LPT) printers. My printer could work if bought a parallel port cable, but that's $15 i could put towards the new HP.
- No WiFi support
- No way of adding SANE for scanner sharing
Alternate
After reading some Ubuntu Help, it became clear that the Alternate installation is more supported (and more highly recommended) than the Minimal installation. The help also noted that the command line system installation is quite different than Ubuntu Server. So, I grabbed the CD and went to town. In the time it took me to write to this point, it's 71% done.
...18 hours later..."Configuring apt"...downloading package 13 of 28....same screen for at least 12 hours...hard drive clicking away...HP network LaserJet soundin' pretty good...
...24 more hours later...still "Configuring apt". Further reading suggests a networking bug sometimes will make this step hang, so I restarted installation sans networking (but with the NIC still installed).
The winning combination was to do an Expert Install with the network enabled. In the problems above where it would stall on "Configuring apt", the solution was to hit Enter and thus select the "cancel" option. It would then move on to the next item and possibly succeed. Eventually the OS got installed. In my case, I failed to set up a default user. I corrected this by booting into recovery mode (holding Shift just after BIOS POST so GRUB shows some boot options) then dropping into a Root shell. I could then make a user (useradd), add him to the "sudo" group, make sure /etc/sudoers looked right (use visudo) and then reboot to log in as my fresh new user.
The winning combination was to do an Expert Install with the network enabled. In the problems above where it would stall on "Configuring apt", the solution was to hit Enter and thus select the "cancel" option. It would then move on to the next item and possibly succeed. Eventually the OS got installed. In my case, I failed to set up a default user. I corrected this by booting into recovery mode (holding Shift just after BIOS POST so GRUB shows some boot options) then dropping into a Root shell. I could then make a user (useradd), add him to the "sudo" group, make sure /etc/sudoers looked right (use visudo) and then reboot to log in as my fresh new user.
The CUPS
To speed things up, I uncommented the "cdrom" lines in /etc/apt/sources.list and popped in the Alternate CD (don't forget to tell BIOS not to boot off the CD anymore, and also don't forget to mount it correctly: sudo mount /dev/cdrom /cdrom). I then did a simple sudo apt-get install cups which installed flawlessly.
I could use console commands to configure my printer, but I decided to get the CUPS web interface rolling first (No need to install Apache/httpd - CUPS serves its own pages). Here are steps to make that happen:
- Add user to lpadmin group: sudo usermod -aG lpadmin username
- If you want to use another computer to reach the web interface, then...
- sudo vi /etc/cups/cupsd.conf
- Comment out two "Listen" lines and add "Listen *:631
- In <Location /> section, add line "Allow 192.168.0.0/24" (or whatever network...)
- Do the same in <Location /admin > section
- Write file and quit :wq
- Restart CUPS daemon sudo /etc/init.d/cups restart
Now just go to the web interface in your browser (ie http://192.168.0.2:631), click Administration, Add Printer, click the one that makes sense, share it, and BAM! Done! In my case, the Samsung showed up out of the box - no drivers needed. BTW, it showed up when plugged into the USB port - no parallel cable required! I think this made for an easier printer detection. However, from the CUPS web interface, I couldn't successfully print a test page - not done!
To try and get things to work [FAIL], I first installed the Samsung drivers:
- Download: wget http://downloadcenter.samsung.com/content/DR/200707/20070720165704156_UnifiedLinuxDriver.tar.gz
- Unzip: sudo tar xzf ./20070720165704156_UnifiedLinuxDriver.tar.gz
- Install: sudo ./cdroot/autorun
That didn't help much. So I followed this guide and ultimately got it to print the test page with the Splix drivers:
apt-get install splix
But network printing didn't work =( Hours (days) later, i'm not sure what's wrong - pretty sure it's all in the cupsd.conf file, but I give up. Just bought a used HP on Amazon for $90 with shipping.
- sudo vi /etc/cups/cupsd.conf
- Comment out two "Listen" lines and add "Listen *:631
- In <Location /> section, add line "Allow 192.168.0.0/24" (or whatever network...)
- Do the same in <Location /admin > section
- Write file and quit :wq
- Restart CUPS daemon sudo /etc/init.d/cups restart
The SANE
Didn't try...The WiFi
Since the Buffalo doesn't have linux support out of the box, step one is to dive into these WiFi docs and hacks.
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