Sunday 16 March 2014

Getting a Dell C1760nw Color Printer up and running on Linux Mint / Ubuntu

I'm not so great at Linux, so I'm trying to use it as my home PC to get more familiar.

The biggest problem with Linux still seems to be getting the manufacturers to create drivers.

On the Dell support pages, there are no linux drivers for the C1760nw.

I found a post somewhere (I forget) that mentioned that C1760nw is basically a rebadaged Xerox Phaser 6000B.

So, I tried downloading the Xerox DEB driver, but that didn't work for me. (Edit: a few people have said they had no problems with the DEB driver - see comments here, so try that first!) So I downloaded the RPM print driver here (filename 6000_6010_rpm_1.01_20110222.zip)

I then opened the zip, extracted the contained Xerox_Phaser_6000B.ppd.gz to my home directory - as i am the only user. Which gives you the pdd file.
Then I extracted the contents of the RPM and found they contained a usr folder.
As root user, I then copied/merged the usr folder contents to /usr.

I then went to the linux printer setup at http://localhost:631
and added the printer:
Other network printers - Internet Printing Protocol (ipp)
Connection socket://192.168.0.100  (where 192.168.0.100 is my printer IP address)
Name - Dell
Provide a PDD file - browsed to and selected the ppd file I extracted earlier
And clicked Add Printer

I then fired up the printer gui with system-config-printer, clicked properties and tried to print a test page.

At which point, I got a printer status like this:
File /usr/lib/cups/filter/... has insecure permissions

(which was obviously the files I had extracted).

A bit of googling revealed I had to set the permissions up on the cups file in question, but being the only user, I just did the directory:

sudo chmod 755 -R /usr/lib/cups/filter
sudo chown -R root /usr/lib/cups/filter

So, I tried another test page, things went a bit further, and then I got this status:
Idle - "Rendering completed"

More googling revealed that I was missing some libraries:

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

Another attempt and the print test finally page popped out!

30 mins to install a printer :c( 

Let's hope my Linux experience gets better. I do like Mint though, gotta say.

These replacement cartridges look cheap: amazon