A few weeks ago, I wrote about setting up the Raspberry Pi to function as an AirPrint Server. This has the effect of allowing Apple’s ios devices to print to regular unix printers (that are accessible to CUPS) using the avahi-daemon for announcements. I’ve gotten all of this to work reliably on the Raspberry Pi and have been testing it out for the last several weeks. I know I promised a tutorial, but it has been rather slow going. The tutorial is coming soon – but today, I have a small video demonstration which shows how well this works.

The one thing I have noticed is that printing via AirPrint is a little slower than printing natively to the printer. My reasoning for that is twofold: One the limited processing power on the Raspberry Pi may be affecting the PDF rasterization time. And two, my Raspberry Pi is connected to a wireless ethernet bridge (802.11g) while the iPad is connected to the wireless access point (802.11n) so there is likely some lag caused by wireless network signals. All things considered, I am currently able to print from the iPad to my network printer (which itself is not AirPrint compatible) having spent on $35. This is the power of the Raspberry Pi!

Stay tuned for the tutorial – it’s on it’s way.