A while ago, I wrote up a piece on how to install a Dell 720 Printer in Ubuntu. Last weekend, after a reinstall of Linux, I found my printer didn’t work. “No problem”, I thought, “I’ll just follow my own tutorial”. To my absolute horror, when I tried to do it, it didn’t work. So I started sifting through the message boards, and found alot of old info that didn’t help. Finally, I was able to get everything squared away, so without further ado, here is the updated and correct Howto for installing a Dell 720 Photo Printer under Ubuntu 7.10.
I got this printer free when I bought my computer a while ago and it turns out that the Dell 720 is a rebranded Lexmark. Lexmark does not offer drivers for Ubuntu, so we will need to get the linux drivers built for RedHat.
Download the drivers from Lexmark here(link opens in a new window).
Now that we have the drivers, we need to extract them and convert them.
- Open a command shell. (actual commands are in bold)
- Extract the drivers with tar
- tar xzvf CJLZ600LE-CUPS-1.0-1.TAR.gz
- Now we need to extract the drivers from the install script since it is built for Redhat
- tail -n +143 z600cups-1.0-1.gz.sh > install.tar.gz
- tar xvzf install.tar.gz
- We will now change the RPMs to DEB packages so Ubuntu can install them using alien
- sudo alien -k z600llpddk-2.0-1.i386.rpm
- sudo alien -k z600cups-1.0-1.i386.rpm
- Now we have the files as .deb, which we can install on Ubuntu
- sudo dpkg -i z600llpddk-2.0-1.i386.deb
- sudo dpkg -i z600cups-1.0-1.i386.deb
- Now we are ready to install the actual printer
- Open the Printer Control Panel System->Administration->Printing
- Add New Printer
- Choose the Lexmark z600 driver
- Print a test page
That should be it.
[...] * I’ve updated this with a better, more simple setup. Click here to go to it.* [...]
nice, detailed tutorial. you may want to mention that most users will need to install alien first, as it is not installed by default.
Very Good Tutorial. Thanks for posting.
I had to use Synaptic Package Manager to install Alien first, as Ubuntu’s Application Add/Remove couldn’t find it. Also, the driver link above didn’t work for me, I used this one:
http://support.lexmark.com/index?page=downloadFile&actp=CONTENT&productCode=&id=DR15809&segment=DOWNLOAD&userlocale=EN_US&locale=en
Additionally, Lexmark renamed the package files so Step 5 should be:
5. Now we have the files as .deb, which we can install on Ubuntu
1. sudo dpkg -i z600llpddk_2.0-1_i386.deb
2. sudo dpkg -i z600cups_1.0-1_i386.deb
Thanks Again.
Are we running these commands in BOLD with in the Run Terminal (ALT F2) or using the Terminal command line found with-in Accessories…I just don’t understand why the hell this is NOT WORKING?!?!? I follow exact instrucitons included the added “alien” package install..no luck, says the “file and directory do not exisit?
This obviously only works for 32-bit userland – if you need 64-bit support, you’re going to have to look elsewhere.
Real noobie from WinWhatever.
Please help.
I have tried several attempts to install a Dell 720. I running Ubuntu 9.10 on a Sony Vaio VGN-TZ191N.
While following the above instructions, I received several “could not find file” type messages. As a guess, I tried to copy the un-tarred files from the desktop to the user folder with my name on it. There seemed to be some initial success, but then more “could not find” errors.
If it is just a matter of learning what to heck to do in Ubuntu, then perhaps I will continue reading instructive materials on the OS. However, if there is something clearly I am missing, please explain.
Thank you,
Eric