 In today's video, I'm going to show you how to install a printer on Linux. Specifically, I'm going to show you how to install that HP printer that you see on the desk behind me. I'm going to install a HP printer on Arch Linux. And the reason I'm going to do this on Arch Linux is because on most other Linux distributions, you actually don't have to bother installing a printer. They make it very, very easy to just plug in a printer and it just magically works. On your standard desktop Linux distributions, like 95% of them, you don't have to do any of what I'm about to do today. So Ubuntu, Mint, and OpenSUSA, and Manjaro, and all of these user-friendly distributions, typically you log into your favorite desktop environment or whatever it is that you installed, GNOME, Plasma, XFCE, and search for a printer program. You find the printer program and it may ask you, do we need to scan for a printer or add a printer? What that means is, did you just plug in a printer? You know, you click the add a printer button and it will search for a driver for the printer. You plug in and it will find the driver and your printer will just work. It's actually very easy to get a printer to work on most Linux distributions, but minimal distributions like Arch Linux, Gen2, server distributions. These are Linux distributions that don't install programs for you by default. You install everything. If you want a print server, you install it. If you want some kind of printer configuration settings manager, you need to install it, right? So today I'm going to show you the programs I install on Arch Linux to make my printers work. So the very first piece of software we want to talk about is the CUPS Printer Service. CUPS actually stands for the Common Unix Print Server, I believe, and CUPS is basically the standard print server on all Linux, all BSD operating systems, and also Mac OS. CUPS was actually developed by Apple for Mac OS, but it's free and open source software and it works on all Unix-like operating systems. So it's one of the real great things that Apple has actually done for the free and open source software community. So I actually do want to thank Apple for creating the CUPS print server because without that, it would have really held us back as far as gaining desktop adoption for Linux because if we couldn't plug in printers and have them work, not nearly as many people would be able to use desktop Linux. So let me show you how to install CUPS. So imagine we just installed Arch Linux. You just installed Arch Linux for the very first time. You installed the Xorg display server. You installed your favorite tallying window manager and you logged in for the very first time. You just plugged in your printer. Your printer, of course, is not going to work. So we need to install the CUPS print server. So sudo pacman-s CUPS and go ahead and give it your root password. Now I already have CUPS installed, so I will decline reinstalling it. Although reinstalling it shouldn't hurt anything. So now we have the CUPS print server installed. Now we actually need to enable that printer server with system D. We need to enable it and we need to start it. So how you do this is with system CTL. So sudo system CTL and then enable space dash dash now because we want to go ahead and start it. Also we want to both enable the print service and start it. So enable space dash dash now CUPS and I could hit enter. I've already enabled it and started it. But again, it doesn't hurt to do it one more time. Now the next thing you want to do is you want to make sure that your user, my user on this machine is called DT. I need to make sure that DT is a member of the LP group. If I just do the word groups here, it will actually list all the groups that I am currently a member of. And I am actually a member of the LP group. The LP group is a special group. It allows you to enable and to actually use and change settings for printers. Now, if you're not a member of the LP group, you can always add your user to the LP group. What you want to do is as root, you want to run this command here. User mod space dash lowercase a capital G. So we're adding this user to a group and we're going to add him to LP. And then the name of your user in my case, it would be DT, but I don't have to run this because I'm already a member of that group. So I've got the CUPS print service enabled. It's running. I'm also already a member of the LP group, but still just plugging in that printer. There's still more to it. I want a graphical program that I can open up and tell it to go search for that printer and find its drivers. And there's several programs available on Linux that will do this, several graphical programs. The one I typically install is a program called system dash config dash printer. So I'm going to sudo pacman dash capital S system dash config dash printer. And I've already got it installed. So I'll decline reinstalling it. Let me clear the screen. Actually, let me just go ahead and kill that terminal. And I'm going to go ahead and launch with a D menu here. System dash config dash printer and show you this program. It's a graphical program. Now you can see it has just yet dash 1510 series here. So it detected that printer that I have plugged into this computer. You see the check mark meaning that printer is ready to go. I can actually use that printer right now. So if I open library office, for example, and I want to start printing pages and library office writer, it'll just work. Now when I first plugged in that HP printer, it did not detect this here. What it did is when you first open it, you actually have a button in the center of the screen and it says add a printer or scan for a printer scan for devices or something like that. And what you want to do is go ahead and click that button and it will detect the printer that you plugged in. It will find the model number. And then once it knows the model number of the printer you plugged in, it will see if it can find a driver for it. And in my case, it detected that this was a DeskJet 1510 series HP printer, but it could not find a driver for it because we didn't actually install a driver for it. So how do you get the HP drivers for your printers? So to get the HP drivers, let me go back to the ArchWiki page. So remember we had the ArchWiki page up for cups. There's also a page for cups, printer specific problems. And this ArchWiki page, it breaks it down by printer brand. So if you have a brother printer, you know, you click on brother and it'll tell you model numbers, what programs you need to install to get the drivers for whatever particular brother printer you have. And of course, I did not have a brother printer. I had an HP printer. So I'm going to click HP and it tells me most HP printers will use HP LIP. HP LIP. And what this is, it's a program that will go and find the drivers for DeskJet and most HP printers. So that is the program I need to install. So let me get back to the desktop. And I'm going to close this system config printer program and I'm going to open the terminal one more time. And I'm going to zoom in. And this time I'm going to sudo pacman dash capital S HP LIP. And again, this is a program. All it is is it gives us all the printer drivers for our HP printers. And then what would happen is if before system config printer didn't detect your print drivers, now it will. If you run it and click add a printer, it'll actually go out. Find your printer and it will also find the correct driver for it. And now you can use it. So that's really not hard at all. Just quick recap. Install the cups printer service enable cups with system CTL. Then install system config printer. Make sure your user is a member of the LP group and then go to that cups printer specific page of your brand of printer and find out the programs that you need to install to get your printer drivers. And then that's it. You know, open system config printer and you're good to go. Let me show you why this is typically not necessary on most desktop Linux distributions because most desktop Linux distributions already have this stuff baited in. 99% of desktop Linux distributions already have the cups printer already installed enabled. If you're a member of the LP group, you don't have to do any of that and they already have a printer config program. For example, in Ubuntu 21.04 here, if I just search for the word printer and this is pretty much for any distribution. Mint, Fedora, OpenSusa, Manjaro. Search for the word printer in the GNOME, Plasma, XFC, whatever desktop environment doesn't matter. Chances are they will have a printer's program and very similar to how I was describing in system config printer. It says add printer or scan for device or whatever it is and you just click that button and it will detect what brand of printer, what model of printer you plugged in and it will find the driver and it will just work. So I hope that answered some questions, especially for those of you new to Arch Linux because that's kind of what this video was geared towards. Some of you guys are installing Arch for the first time and you're kind of, it's a little different because you're not spoon fed all of this stuff, the way you are in other distributions. You actually have to go install some of this under the hood kind of stuff like the cup server that you never had to install before. You don't even know what they are. Nobody's ever told you about cups. So hopefully I cleared some things up today. Now before I go, I want to thank a few special people. I want to thank the producers of this episode. Gabe James, Mitchell Paul, Scott Wessok, Camille Allen, Chuck Commander, Angry Diokai, David Dillon, Gregory Heiko, Lee Maxim, Mike Nitrix, Erion, Alexander Peace, Sergeant Fodor, Polytech, Raver, Red Prophet, Steven and Willie. They're my highest-eared patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This episode about how to set up your HP printer on Arch Linux, it wouldn't have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these guys as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I'm supported by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to help me out, please consider supporting me. Subscribe to Distro Tube over on Patreon. Alright guys, peace. Yes, I actually thanked Apple for creating the cup's printer service.