How to connect a USB GDI printer to Linux over a D-Link print server?
- by jpe
The setup is the following:
+------------+ +-----------------+ +---------+
| HP LJ P1005|--USB--| D-Link DPR-1020 |---LAN---| PC Linux|
+------------+ +-----------------+ + +---------+
| +------------+
+--| PC Windows |
+------------+
HP LJ P1005 is one of those GDI printers that requires the printer driver to do
most of the work for it and therefore is a bit "special".
D-Link DPR-1020 is a print server with an Ethernet and an USB port that actually supports printing to challenged (read GDI) printers using a utility called PS-Link. What the utility does is basically mirror a USB port over the network to the print server so that the printer driver and the printer both are happy to talk to each other.
The PC-s are notebooks that come and go, i.e. are not there all the time.
Is there an equivalent of the D-Link PS-Link utility for Linux that could mirror a USB port over the network for a Linux host?
And can the solution be used with D-Link DPR-1020?
If not then I basically wasted the money buying the print server because the goal was to share a small printer among a couple of users with diverse operating systems in an office.
The print server specs say that it supports Linux and LJ P1005, but the Catch 22 appears to be the solution used for GDI printers...
It should be noted that it is possible to print from Linux to LJ P1005 directly over USB. This far sharing involved reconnecting the USB cable to appropriate computer to print. Now one of the desks is separated, so the cable does not work.
Searching the net did not yield anything useful. Please do not suggest solutions involving a Windows machine (either virtual or not), my question is whether a solution only involving a Linux machine exists.
