Wireless Printing in Ubuntu

Ok, so I bought a refur­bished Brother HL-2170W from Newegg for seventy bucks recently. It’s a small laser prin­ter that works over wifi, which is per­fect for an apart­ment with room­ma­tes, ’cause I can just stick it in the living room where it doesn’t really bother anybody.

I knew going into this that prin­ting in Linux is hard, and I couldn’t ima­gine that net­work prin­ting in Linux would be any easier, but I figu­red it must be possible.

It’s pretty hard. My rou­ter (a Linksys WRT54G v5 [or 6?]) has this “Secu­reEasy­Se­tup™” thing that’s meant to make this kind of stuff just push-button easy. But for wha­te­ver rea­son, the prin­ter can’t find and con­nect to our net­work. I hoo­ked it up directly to the rou­ter, but nothing appears in the DHCP table in the Linksys admin panel.

I did, howe­ver, find out the MAC address of the prin­ter by prin­ting out its con­fi­gu­ra­tion report. So, if I finally hook up the WRT54GL that I got a cou­ple months ago, I can ins­tall the DD-WRT firm­ware, and assign a sta­tic IP to that MAC address; at which point I can then log into the printer’s admin panel at its IP address, con­fi­gure it to con­nect to our wire­less net­work, and that should be that.

There is of course an easy ins­tall CD for Win­dows that will set this up for me rela­ti­vely easily, but I know it can be done without resor­ting to that.