February 2016 – Goings on

Getting a Dell 1350cnw working on Ubuntu 64bit 13.10 and higher is much more work than it should be.

This colour Laser (LED really) printer looks lovely on paper, small footprint, USB/Wifi/LAN connectivity, reasonable supply costs and great quality. They are also very cheap right now, I got one hardly used from ebay with half full toner and a complete spare toner set for £30! Ok, getting connected to WiFi is a bit of a pain because of the awful text entry system through the printers panel, ensure that once it is connected you allocate it an fixed IP address using Mac address allocation or whatever your DHCP implementation (often in your broadband router if this is at your home) calls it.

Once connected to the Wifi, it works great with Windows machines and probably 32bit Linux (is anyone still using this) but with 64bit Linux it is a bit of a pain, here is what I did to overcome this using the Xerox Phaser 6000B drivers and CUPS – thanks Apple!

I have carried this procedure out on both Ubuntu Mate 15.04 64bit, Ubuntu Studio 15.04-18.04 64bit, Mint 18.3 and 19.3 distributions.

Get the deb file from http://www.support.xerox.com/support/phaser-6010/downloads/enus.html?operatingSystem=linux

unzip xerox-phaser-6000-6010_1.0-1_i386
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libc6:i386 libncurses5:i386 
sudo apt-get install libstdc++6:i386 libcupsimage2:i386
sudo dpkg -i xerox-phaser-6000-6010_1.0-1_i386.deb
apt-get -f install
cp /usr/share/ppd/Xerox/Xerox_Phaser_6000B.ppd.gz /tmp
gunzip /tmp/Xerox_Phaser_6000B.ppd.gz

Add your unix username to the lp group:

sudo gpasswd -a  lp
sudo gpasswd -a root lp

DefaultAuthType Negotiate
edit your /etc/cups/cupsd.conf changing DefaultAuthType from Negotiate to Basic.

Point your web browser at Dell 1350cnw on Linux CUPS administration pages: http://localhost:631
You will need to login with your unix username and password.

Under Administration I ticked:

Share printers connected to this system Max client 100
Allow printing from the Internet
Allow remote administration
Allow users to cancel any job
Preserve job history
Maximum jobs 500
Remain metadata Yes
Retain Documents 1d
Save debugging information Max log size: 0

Make sure your printer is on.

Add the printer. 2 Dell 1350cnw’s appeared under Network Printers, I picked: “Dell 1350cnw Color Printer; NIC 17.10,ESS 201008241506 (Dell 1350cnw Color Printer)” and clicked Continue.
I ticked Sharing to Share this printer and Continue.
I ignored the Make / Model, etc and clicked Choose file and pointed to the /tmp/Xerox_Phaser_6000B.ppd file we stored above and clicked Add Printer.

On the next page I clicked Set Default options and that was it.

I was then able to successfully print a test page from CUPS and documents from Libre Office and from Chrome browser.

The ability to manage CUPS from outside your network (Remote Administration) can save your bacon sometimes. I had to do this when the kids were trying to print something that it wasn’t working.

CUPS is great, thank you Michael Sweet and also Apple, you have done a good job here – and that isn’t something I thought that I’d ever say about Apple.

If you want to manage a printer on one of your Linux machines from outside your network, allow port 631 through your firewall and edit the CUPS config, /etc/cups/cupsd.conf as follows:

In the and sections add Allow 257.257.257.257 after the Order statement. This isn’t a valid IP, you should replace this with the remote IP address, i.e. the public IP address that you will be connecting from.

Also add DefaultEncryption Never in the main section, I put it under the LogLevel statement.

You should then be able to point your web browser at your broadband connections IP_address:631 and get CUPS management. The URL in your web browser should look something like this:

http://257.257.257.257:631

Of course, 257 is not valid, I did that on purpose.

If you are in the UK, consider ICUK for broadband, they have a great network and broadband IP addresses, although dynamic, rarely change – I’ve been with them 5 years and my IP address has not changed. This makes connecting to machines in your own network very convenient.