Here is a tutorial of using the University of Reading’s FollowMe Printer on Linux.

Pre-requisites

This section is copied from the official instruction for Windows devices.

• Your device must be connected via Eduroam to the University of Reading network (or wired connection).
• You must not be using a VPN
• You must have a valid University of Reading IT user account. This service is unavailable to visitors.

Instructions

Firstly, install cups and samba, and other necessary packages. Please refer to Arch Wiki or the document of your own Linux distro.

Once cups and samba are configured properly, visit http://localhost:631 in your browser. If a popup asks for your username and password, use the ones of your Linux system. Then:

1. Click Administration in the top bar.
2. Click Add Printer in the “Printer” section.
3. Choose Windows Printer via SAMBA.
4. Enter the following address in the Connection field: smb://RDG-HOME/<your_student_number>:<your_password>@uorprint.rdg.ac.uk/FollowMe-BW The student number is like “ab123456”, and special characters in your password (if present) should be escaped following the URL encoding rule.
5. Click Continue.
6. Give it a name, for example, FollowMe-BW.
7. Choose Generic for Make, and Generic PostScript Printer for Model.
8. Save.
9. Add the FollowMe-Colour for colour printing if you need it.
10. Congratulations! Now you can send your files to the University Printers.

Notes

Security concerns

Your username and password will be stored in plaintext in /etc/cups/printers.conf. However, this file can only be read by its owners (in my case, root and cpus), so the risk is relatively small for personal computers.

If you cannot accept this risk, remove your username and password from the URL and use smb://uorprint.rdg.ac.uk/FollowMe-BW. Theoretically, in this case, you will be asked for your username and password when you create a print job. I’m not sure whether any desktop environment offers a “remember password” feature.

My credential is hardcoded but still being asked

run this command in your console:

sudo lpadmin -p FollowMe-BW -o auth-info-required=none