Printer set up

Wow, it's been over a year since I've posted, I guess I've been busy with other things.

So I recently got a new laptop. My old T420 Thinkpad was definitely showing it's age. Even with an SSD, it was just slow. My new one is an HP Dev One, and it is very nice and speedy. It came with Pop!_OS, which I tried for about an hour then installed Arch, because that's what I've been running for years.

Of course, no printers were installed, and it always seems like it takes me a while to figure out the right URL for the network printers. Then I was reading through the CUPS documentation, and found this gem:

/usr/lib/cups/backend/snmp 192.168.4.46

Change the IP address as needed, but you'll get back a lot of info about the printer, in particular, the specific URL you need to enter into CUPS:

INFO: Using default SNMP Community public

network lpd://192.168.4.46:515/PASSTHRU "EPSON XP-630 Series" "EPSON XP-630 Series" "MFG:EPSON;CMD:ESCPL2,BDC,D4,D4PX,ESCPR2,END4;MDL:XP-630 Series;CLS:PRINTER;DES:EPSON XP-630 Series;CID:EpsonRGB;FID:FXN,DPA,WFA,ETN,AFN,DAN,WRA;RID:20;DDS:022500;ELG:0D02;SN:573541593138373069;" ""

And there is the answer, lpd://192.168.4.46:515/PASSTHRU. I pasted that into CUPS "add a printer" setup, and it worked perfectly! Plus it shows the model number of the printer, which is also handy.