AirPrint on Ubuntu

How to print from iPhone/iPad (iOS 4.2) via Ubuntu

I just noticed that with the latest 10.6.5 update, Apple at the last minute disabled support for printing from iOS 4.2 devices to shared printers in OSX. Instead of trying to overwrite new drivers with prerelease versions, I thought that there must be someone, somewhere out there who has figured out how to do this using the fine, free tools available to us. I like open standards, open tools, open source.

From what I understand AirPrint supports printing two ways:

I don’t have a new HP ePrint printer, but I do have a wonderful Ubuntu 10.04 server running avahi (open source Bonjour/mDNS responder)… I wonder if there’s a way to have my server act as an AirPrint device and then send the print job to my networked printer?

Enter this post. Excellent! Set up a Bonjour service, point it to a shared printer, done!

Here’s what I had to do in Ubuntu to get printing to work, YMMV:

I’m not sure if all printers will work out of the box with this configuration, but since my printer supports PostScript I assume it can rasterize pretty much anything iOS will send it. In any case, I didn’t have to configure any filters or print settings. It just worked. Hopefully Apple won’t further cripple AirPrinting by also “patching” iOS so that only HP ePrint devices are supported and it no longer recognizes Bonjour services with subtype _universal._sub._ipp._tcp. We’ll see what happens!

Now all I need is an iPad. And a reason to print.