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.