Planetary Ponderings

Yesterday I had to buy a new printer because my old one packed up over the weekend. Since I run Ubuntu/Kubuntu Linux exclusively at home, I needed a printer I could be sure would work in Linux. This means that generally I need to get either HP or Epson printers. I've had both makes of printers before, and they've both served me well, so I have no problem being "limited" to those two.

I picked up an HP Deskjet D2663, a printer similar to my last one, one of the bottom of the range of HP's. I don't need anything fancy, I already have a small photo printer (it came with the camera) and I doubt I'd use the scanner from one of those all-in-ones. The D2663 is a cheap printer, but a decent one.

My wife and I have separate computers, which means that we need a shared printer, so I attach my computer to one of the servers at home and then we both have access to it at the same time. Unfortunately the server is running Hardy, which means it doesn't have the latest driver for this brand new printer.

I went to the HPLIP site, and downloaded the tarball, and looked for a PPD file. I found the HP Deskjet D2600 series PPD, but when I loaded it, I got an error message that said that the "foomatic-rip-hplip" filter was not found. I opened the PPD file and found two lines that specified that filter. After a bit of googling, I found that I just needed to remove the "-hplip" from the filter name, and it worked!

Yay, so now I have a new printer, working perfectly on my Ubuntu Hardy server.