It’s seldom that I use printer at home. The last time I used it I think to print a resume for my current company. Today, I’d really need to use a printer to print some stuff. The printer that I have is HP PSC 1210 (not mine actually). I’m quite reluctant to setup the printer on my Archlinux system because of my previous experiences setting up printer on linux system is not that enjoyful. Some know how about the printer’s driver that work best with your system is needed plus some other application to make it work. Luckily, I’ve done it before, so I’d try to see if the notes that made sometimes ago still applicable to my current system. It’s was a post that I made to ittutor forum. Based on that notes, all that I need was to install the cups package from pacman. In that notes, I’m using a parallel printer, so most of the stuff to make parallel port working can be skipped. The HP that I have currently was a USB printer.
The system automatically detect the printer once I plugged it into the USB port and switched it on. Good start, I hoped. Then I started the cups services:-
# /etc/rc.d/cups start
Then log on to the CUPS’s web based management interface. I need to select the printer’s driver but none was listed in the CUPS configuration interface. I tried to select some random drivers and print the test page but nothing happened. Then I looked into http://www.linuxprinting.org/ to see if my printer works well with linux. It was, and the drivers are called hpijs. I try my luck with pacman:-
# pacman -Ss hpijs
extra/hpijs 1.7.1-1
HP Linux inkjet driver. Provides support for DeskJet, OfficeJet, Photosmart,
Business Inkjet and some LaserJet printer models.
No need to mention how happy I am.
# pacman -S hpijs
Targets: foomatic-filters-3.0.2-1 hpijs-1.7.1-1
Total Package Size: 1.4 MB
Proceed with upgrade? [Y/n] y
Pacman download all the package but then complained there was a conflict:-
checking package integrity... done.
loading package data... done.
checking for file conflicts...
error: the following file conflicts were found:
foomatic-filters: /etc/foomatic/filter.conf: exists in filesystem
foomatic-filters: /usr/bin/foomatic-gswrapper: exists in filesystem
foomatic-filters: /usr/man/man1/foomatic-gswrapper.1.gz: exists in filesystem
I know that I’d already installed package foomatic before but I don’t know what the differences between foomatic and foomatic-filters. I don’t care about that:-
# pacman -R foomatic
# pacman -S hpijs
This time, no conflict reported and all packages were installed. Restarting cups and I got the drivers for my printer listed. Print the test page and … it’s worked !!
