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How can I control the usage of a printer on ubuntu desktop?

cn flag
Sam

I live in the dormitory, and we need to print a lot. I have bought a home HP printer, and a laptop. I'd like to share the printer and the laptop with my roommates (about 500 people), and charge them printing fees.

Here's what I am thinking about:

  1. The user inserts an USB drive containing the file to print.
  2. prompt an box for he or she to login, pay fees (Using a Stripe API) before (Well if that's difficult, then after is ok) printing the document
    3.Record what he or she printed, in case he or she wants a refund.

Here's limitations.

  1. I want to make sure it is somehow difficult to bypass the paying process, or I would be left out of pocket.
  2. Our school has strict limitations on electronic devices, so I will finish the project on my own laptop and install the devices in the dorm.
  3. Limited internet access at the dorm.
  4. Print several types of files including office docs, pptx, xlsx,csv,txt and images jpg,png,tiff,webp, and pdf etc.

Here are my questions:

  1. Is there an existing software I can use for this project? I searched github, found none.
  2. How am I going to disable the normal ctrl+p printing process and make them 'login'?
  3. I had a little coding experience in python and php, and yes very little c/c++
qwr avatar
kr flag
qwr
This is essentially an entire print server or network. Probably no open source ones exist integrated with Stripe API so you'll have to write your own.
qwr avatar
kr flag
qwr
This is no trivial task and would be quite a complex operation. Do you know how to manage a server?
br flag
Perhaps PyKota can help out.
Sam avatar
cn flag
Sam
Thanks @ brian_p. And yes @qwr , but only installing LAMP,LNMP. Pykota is what I need, but the python dependencies are frustrating, as it is a od project written in python2 and unmaintained. Still trying, I will reply if I got further result
Sam avatar
cn flag
Sam
I know a little PHP though, so using stripe api is easy.
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