Installing a driver the hard way

Hello,

I found the driver¹ for my printer, a Canon i-SENSYS LBP-2900. I installed it on Linux and it works fine. Now, I'd like to plug my printer into my Synology DS110+ NAS and to use my NAS as a print server. How can I install the driver on the NAS? The drivers are provided as .deb and .rpm files, so I will have to unpack them and probably to copy some files manually because there doesn't seem to be RPM or APT on the lightweight version of Linux in the NAS. Could you give me some information to do it please?
Thanks ;)



¹ software.canon-europe.com/software/0040567.asp

Most NAS arrays are NOT x86 devices, but are MIPS or ARM processor systems running some version of embedded Linux. I doubt you will find an appropriate driver, but a trip to the NAS manufacturer's web site may clarify that. Installing drivers on these devices may require that you download the kernel code, and build the printer driver from source using available cross-platform tool chain compilers. Then you have to reinstall stuff. If you make a mistake, you may "brick" the NAS. This is not an exercise for a newbie.

Oh oh! I won't mess with that :)

My suggestion is to install the printer on your server/workstation and make it sharable. Not difficult to do, and then it is available for others on the network, much as it would be if attached to the NAS. It may be that the NAS has drivers for this, especially if it supports CUPS/Gutenprint for printing services. However, if it doesn't, then installing on your networked system would be the next best thing, IMO.

Yeah, I'll leave it that way ;)
Thanks.