Rescuing old printers with an in-browser Linux VM bridged to WebUSB over USB/IP

If you are using an LLM, wouldn't it have been a lot easier to just have the LLM find the relevant CUPS driver decompile or just capture the USB traffic, and rewrite it in Go or something native? (No need to deal with the system printing framework, the goal was just an app that accepts JPEG input.)

> I must apologise that I haven’t so far open-sourced any part of this that I don’t have to. Mainly that’s because I think this would be an awesomely sticky web property for a printer consumables firm to integrate with their sales site. And I’d much prefer it if they paid me to white-label it for them, rather than just forking a repo and getting it all for free.

They might be interested if they cared at all about the ease of use of their printers

Okay, this is reasonably genius. I have quite a few USB devices lying around that are either old enough or were niche enough that they don't work on modern _anything_, even Linux. One of them is a GameBoy Advance flash cartridge.

Thank you, loved this and it made me "duh!".

I have an old-ish Samsung laser printer that works perfectly and a Linux file server at home and the printer no longer supports AirPrint.

I never thought about using the Linux box as an AirPrint server! This will free me from all the odd print requests from my kids! (probably)

I have an old Epson MX80 dot-matrix printer in the closet, have thought about getting a Raspberry Pi and setting that up so we can wirelessly print to it. But... who would really want that?

This is pretty cool! Thanks for sharing.

Isn't cups a de facto apple project? What's the VM getting you?

Too bad Apple is still preventing the WebUSB spec from being standardized. They won't even make suggestions to get it through committee because WebUSB might cut into their native app store.

I would have asked Claude to write a driver. But this works, too. :)

what the heck we're not in web 1.0 anymore are we

Another AI add.

surely a glorious OS like osx would not be without support for hardware that linux supports? when will it be year of osx desktop?