Network LAN printer without manually installing drivers

Question

I got a new printer with a LAN port, but I can't get it to work properly. What I expected was 1) Plug the printer in the router 2) Install it via a computer 3) All the computers in the network can print through it.

But no, so far it seems that I will have to manually install the driver on every!single!pc and operating system I have home. (Thanks Canon, your Linux support is really great!) - is this really the case? Can't I somehow set the printer so it "just prints" when needed?

(I'm now talking about Windows machines, as it's mainly for my family)

The printer is LBP7100Cn, just in case.

Answer 1

The way Windows print serving is supposed to work is that the print server is supposed to have drivers for all possible operating systems that might want to connect to it, and when you add the printer, the driver is downloaded from the print server on-demand.

So Windows drivers are involved even with a printer with its own built-in print server.

You might try adding the printer through Start -> Devices and Printers -> Add printer and see if it can pull the driver from the printer (not sure if very many printers do this, though - in our corporate environment all printers are behind a Windows server acting as the print server.)

One thing that might save you some work is to designate one system on your network as the "print server" - meaning create a shared printer on this system, and then have the remaining systems connect to the share (NOT directly to the printer's IP but to the "shared printer" on the PC). I think in that case they can pull the driver in the manner I'm describing above.