Linux Mint has become my favourite Linux distribution as of lately. It is built on Ubuntu but with the added benefit of native installation of lots of extra drivers, audio/video codecs, and small programs that make life a lot easier. This is particularly important as Linux is not my main platform, and I don’t want to spend a lot of time and effort to make everything work when I install a new system.
I just installed Linux Mint on what I thought to be a super-slow windows box, only to notice that it runs super-fast and smooth with Linux. Particularly impressive was that it managed to find all the drivers for sound/video cards, webcam, etc. The entire install of a clean system with everything took less than 30 minutes. I don’t even want to think of how that compares to installing either OSX or Windows and adding everything else (FireFox, OpenOffice, +++). It also nicely installed drivers for my HP LaserJet P1005 printer. However, the problem was that the printer didn’t print. No error messages, the printer showed up, the OS thought it printed, but nothing came out. After a bit fiddling back and forth I found that this is due to some problem with the built-in drivers.
So as a reference to myself, and for everyone else there with the same issue, here is what I did to solve the problem:
- Deleted the old printer in the printer setup window
- Installed the foo2xqx driver using the terminal
$ wget -O foo2zjs.tar.gz http://foo2zjs.rkkda.com/foo2zjs.tar.gz
$ tar zxf foo2zjs.tar.gz
$ cd foo2zjs
$ make
$ ./getweb P1005 # Get HP LaserJet P1005 firmware file
$ sudo make install
$ sudo make install-hotplug
$ sudo make cups
- Installed the printer using the normal printer setup utility. This time it asked whether I wanted to install with the hotplug option. This seems to be important!
- The printer still didn’t work, but I found a discussion where it was suggested to do the following:
$ sudo rm /etc/cups/ssl/server.*<br />$ sudo /etc/init.d/cups start<br />
- Finally, the printer prints!
{.zemanta-pixie}
{.zemanta-pixie-img}