Question Printing locally from Chromebook to Google Print 1.0 printer

[maddogmcgee]

Hi all

In my tuition centre I have 4 PC's and 12 chromebooks, plus a MFC-9335CDW printer. The printer has super cheap supplies (2500 page toner for 10 bucks online) BUT is super slow when kids are printing from the Chromebooks....something they do every ten minutes or so. I have read that Google Cloud Print 1.0 printers send a large raster file to the Google Servers and then back to the printer. I would happily spend a few hundred upgrading to a Google Print 2.0 printer (as I have read this enables local printing) but its going to increase the cost of printing by about 6 times due to the much higher cost of the toner and drums. I want to avoid this if I can (at least till I use all the old toner).

I have played around with different settings and chrome extensions, and have updated the firmware but it still a slow 1.0 device.

I don't have any experience with print servers but was thinking I could buy a cheap one or use A windows PC that is next to the printer as a server? I assume sending printing to a windows PC on the same 2.4ghz network and then to the printer would still be heaps faster if this is possible?

Is there any way to force documents to print locally and what would be the easiest?

Many Thanks

 

[SamirD]

The brother lasers are awesome, so you're in good shape to start. It is a network printer by nature, so as long as there is a way to get a native driver for the chromebooks, that is your best bet.

Okay, looks like chromebooks suck. There really isn't a native driver for local printing capability until version 59:

Chromebook Users Can Now Print Via Network

Chrome OS continues to mature and become a more well-rounded platform for its users. The latest update to version 59 brought with it a few minor, albeit, crucial additions to our favorite operating system. While many are still awaiting the Google Play Store to hit their Chromebooks, the Chromium...

chromeunboxed.com

The good thing is that chromebooks do seem to use the native linux cups driver which brother printers have supported forever:

How to print to a local network printer from a Chromebook | TechRepublic

Chromebooks offer convenience and portability, but what about printing? Here are three ways to print directly to your networked printer from a Chromebook.

www.techrepublic.com

If neither of those work, I would just use the native HP Print for Chrome since the Brother is HP compatible. I used to fool a HP-branded stand alone print server by connecting my Brother to it and had no issues. Unless HP has somehow locked out non-HP printers.

If none of those work, you can apparently install some sort of driver on a windows pc to share the printer with chrome, but I don't know if that is driect or not.

Worst case, just wire the printer to the network since it will be faster that way.

 

[mxnerd]

Try what SamirD suggested first.

The problem probably is related to your internet upload speed, however.

See if you can get faster upload speed from your ISP.

 

[maddogmcgee]

Appreciate the suggestions.

I will try the linux driver when I go into work today.

Love the HP idea, so will give that a go if the linux driver fails.

I assume I have the latest chrome version on them at the moment but I never had any luck getting the native cups printing working. May have been user error although the other article did mention his Brother printer didn't want to play nice.

Download speed is fine at around 40Mbps but up is only around 15-20 at peak times, at best I could double the speed which would still be very slow. The kids print off 5-10 page pdf's which are rather large, between uploading it (to a US server from Australia?) then downloading it and having the printer actually print, it takes forever.

 

[mxnerd]

Another idea is to save printing job as a pdf file on a Windows network shared folder(with Brother printer setup properly on the network).

Use some kind of folder watching software (or scripts, ex VBscript or AutoIt)on that machine, whenever there is a new pdf file is generated, that file got printed and then deleted.

You can buy professional batch printing software, but I'm sure it will be expensive.

==

How to use Chrome OS’s native Samba client

https://brismuth.com/how-to-use-chrome-oss-native-samba-client-296b2e540589

==

If you don't know how to program, bring your pdf auto printing question to AutoIt's forum, I believe many users will be very happy to help.

 

[SamirD]

I'm sure there is a way to get this to work with the Brother directly as it does support A LOT of printing protocols. You can log into the web interface and see all of them as some may not be enabled.

 

[mxnerd]

Don't know what version of Chrome OS OP's ChromeBooks were running.

I set up Neverware's CloudReady (same code base as ChromeBook) Home Edition with Chromium OS v72.4 in VMware, when I launched the Chromium Browser and tried to print a web page, it immediately identified my Brother HL-2270DW on local network. No need to use Google's Cloud Print at all and no CUPS driver installation required.

==

Now CloudReady updated itself to v76.4. Again, no CUPS printers or Cloud Print being setup.

 

[SamirD]

Cloudready seems pretty interesting. Can it connect to samba shares out of the box?

 

[mxnerd]

Can it connect to samba shares out of the box?

Yes, but Google just want to hide it.

You have to click the 3 dots dropdown menu from Google Chrome, click Downloads, click 3 dots dropdown menu again, choose Open downloads folder,
click 3 dots dropdown menu yet again, click Add new service, choose SMB file share, then enter the required File share URL (\\server\share, I need to enter IP address to make it work), login name and password.

You can then open pdf files or play mp4 media files, etc. from Start button, then Files.

My opinion: I would rather spend a little bit more money to buy a Windows laptop.

 

[SamirD]

Yes, but Google just want to hide it.

You have to click the 3 dots dropdown menu from Google Chrome, click Downloads, click 3 dots dropdown menu again, choose Open downloads folder,
click 3 dots dropdown menu yet again, click Add new service, choose SMB file share, then enter the required File share URL (\\server\share, I need to enter IP address to make it work), login name and password.

You can then open pdf files or play mp4 media files, etc. from Start button, then Files.

My opinion: I would rather spend a little bit more money to buy a Windows laptop.

Interesting. You think it could save browser prints to pdf to the smb share?

 

[mxnerd]

Interesting. You think it could save browser prints to pdf to the smb share?

Unfortunately, the SMB share did not appear as saving location when I tried to save web page as a PDF file, even if I'm admin and I gave the sharing folder full read-write permissions, all I could see were Downloads folder and Google Drive.
You can save the file into these 2 locations then move it to SMB share though.

 

[SamirD]

Unfortunately, the SMB share did not appear as saving location when I tried to save web page as a PDF file, even if I'm admin and I gave the sharing folder full read-write permissions, all I could see were Downloads folder and Google Drive.
You can save the file into these 2 locations then move it to SMB share though.

Yeah, I'll be sticking with regular windows system then. Thank you for trying it for me!

 

[maddogmcgee]

Yeah this is a pain. I am hoping I can get it working this week. On Friday night I quickly tried the linux driver and HP app but no luck so far. I also should have checked the chrome version in case I am only getting security updates.

Apart from the printing, they are kinda perfect for my use case though. They are low power, low cost, boot quickly, have updates that wait for me to restart and the software I need is all through the chrome browser.

Are there any android apps that do local printing setup?

Edit: the android brother app says local printing so I will try that tomorrow morning.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brother.mfc.brprint&hl=en_AU

Edit Edit: so many android apps promise local printing over wifi, one of them has to work with Chrome Os...I think.

 

[mxnerd]

Android app not necessarily will run on ChromeBooks.

Sign in - Google Accounts

 

[SamirD]

On Friday night I quickly tried the linux driver and HP app but no luck so far.

You should have some luck with either of these routes. Can you explain what did/did not work? I know cups is pretty solid when it comes to the brothers because that's what my wife's mac uses.

 

[maddogmcgee]

Looks like the cups printing is working. Thanks very much for your help guys. This saved me $350 AUD, plus $50 toner per 2500 pages plus cheaper drums.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

We have a Brother inkjet, and laser, and have both working fine by using a Raspberry Pi 1 CUPS Print Server with our Windows, MacOS, and Chromebook systems. Glad you got it worked out!

 

[SamirD]

We have a Brother inkjet, and laser, and have both working fine by using a Raspberry Pi 1 CUPS Print Server with our Windows, MacOS, and Chromebook systems. Glad you got it worked out!

Sweet! Glad you got cups working.