How I set up my school printers

date:11 May 2015

I use Ubuntu 14.04 on my personal laptop at the moment. Here is how I add the printers.

  1. Go to System Settings, then Printers, or open Printers from the Launcher.

  2. Click Add.

  3. Choose the printer you want from the printer list. Say you choose dali.

  4. In the New Printer dialog, click Network Printer → Windows Printer via SAMBA. Add a printer from the URL smb://socs-ad/sms-2.cs.bham.ac.uk/dali.

    Use Set authentication details now, using your School username + password. Do not try Verify..., it will not work, but printing will work.

  5. In the driver selection dialog, choose the recommended driver, and use the options recommended by the School. You can find these by clicking on the printer types in the printer list.

  6. For both the printer name and description, use the printer name like dali. Copy the room number from the printer list to the Location field if you want.

  7. Print a test page.

If you ssh to a School server, you can test if the printing worked, by running e.g. lpq -P dali repeatedly. Or run it in a loop with watch -n .5 lpq -P dali. Or, of course, you can actually walk to the printer.

The printers I add like this work on my personal laptop, but only if I connect from the wired network. The wireless network is separate in some ways and printing won’t work; you might have luck using the VPN, or you can scp your PDFs to a School machine and lpr with the correct options from there. The scp approach works, but it’s really not as handy as just setting up printers the normal way.

This guide is based on the School guide for printing on self maintained Windows PCs.