CUPS Server Auto Install Driver for IPP Printers on Clients?

[Brian Kroth]

I'm wondering if it's possible (or could be made possible) to allow some form of auto-install of printer drivers (even if it's just to help select an existing driver on the system) when using an IPP style URI on clients?

I know this is already possible if one uses SMB, but that's less desirable, and only works with Windows.

In some searching it seems there's a "printer-driver-installer" attribute defined in the RFC, but CUPS doesn't allow one to make use of it.  The "printer-make-and-model" attribute is defined, but clients don't seem to make use of it (not much you can do there, unless the client is also CUPS, though if that were the case perhaps something intelligent could be done with the CUPS-Get-PPDs call or some such).

To elaborate a bit more, I'm thinking of Windows and OS X clients connecting to a central Linux CUPS (1.4.4 from Debian Squeeze) server for accounting and other custom programming tidbits.

In the Windows print server/client world I've seen things that (if they client browser is IE) allow the user to simply click a link and using some ActiveX or whatever it will just handle the install/setup for them.  Even without that, if you go through the normal Windows dialogs and give it one of the https://windows-printserver/printers/foo/.printer style links, it will again figure out the right driver and just do it.

I was hoping I could something similar with my Linux CUPS for OS X and Windows clients.

Thanks,
Brian