Herman Bos » printing

Dear lazyweb, a network printer with perfect Linux support?

Herman — Tue, 09 May 2006 13:43:24 +0000

I’m looking for a good network printer. The only requirements would be that its a laser printer and that it works perfectly in Linux (would be nice if it works from windows as well).

My Linux printing experience hasn’t been rosey. From pain in the ass printers like in my last blog post to really fancy kyocera network printers. The latter worked ok in the sense it printed but you couldn’t use any advanced options like select paper or output selection and several other features (like in windows).

If anyone can recommend me a network printer that just works great in Linux I would be able to stop grinding my teeth.
Thanks in advance,

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HP LaserJet 1000

Herman — Tue, 09 May 2006 12:43:24 +0000

Unfortunately not all printers are as plug ‘n play as you would hope. Although it looks really promising when you just plugged it in. If you select add printer in gnome it actually detects the printer. However when you print a test page,.. nothing happens.
With the instructions on linuxprinting.org you do get it to work in breezy:

wget http://foo2zjs.rkkda.com/foo2zjs.tar.gz
tar xzvf foo2zjs.tar.gz
cd foo2zjs
make
./getweb 1000 (this step wasn't neccesary since the files seem to be included in the tarball)
make install
make install-hotplug

The shitty thing about this printer is that firmware needs to be uploaded to the printer when its plugged in. The foo2zjs package in Ubuntu apparently doesn’t include the firmware files. The /usr/share/foo2zjs/firmware directory is empty. The “getweb” util isn’t available either.

Its probably because the firmware is not freely distributeable, I didn’t look into this but its a common reason.

Secondly to get it on dapper nicely there should be an udev script, since only a hotplug script is supplied and hotplug is byebye in dapper.

In other news: 158 comments marked as spam.

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Kyocera network printers with CUPS/Ubuntu

Herman — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 16:42:20 +0000

Had to fix up serveral Kyocera Mita KM 1650 KX and Kyocera Mita KM 2550 KX “printers” here. Quite fancy and they support every printing protocol I could imagine, so should be easy right? Unfortunately the documentation is quite scarce. And the model/type of the Kyocera’s on this network were not available in the default driver list of CUPS.

Half of the work is to fetch the PPD file. I found the PPD’s I needed at linuxprinting.org/download/PPD but you can also get it from the Kyocera website or driver CD.

Although you can spend several hours clicking and messing around with several graphical frontends I recommend using the command line tool `lpadmin`.

sudo lpadmin -p MyKyoceraPrinter -E -v socket://192.168.1.100:9100 -P Kyocera_Mita_KM-2550_en.ppd
If the ppd file is not in the current directory you have to specify the full path. Thats all.

At first I tried to add the printer with the ipp protocol but failed (if you managed please leave a comment). Since the JetDirect way works I didn’t investigate this further.

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