How to install a Lexmark new generation Printer on Gentoo Linux wireless

Lexmark is one of the printer producers that is making steps toward linux world. New printers are nice and useful (I own a S405 Interpret) but most important a couple online driver for linux are available. A pity they are closed source. A very pity this procedure is FORCED if you want to print wireless, as they use a proprietary printing backend.



Let's get into the how to. First of all you have to get your box ready for printing. I suggest steps from 1 to 3 in Gentoo's Handbook "Printing How To". Chapter 4 starts printer installation, but we are going to use Lexmark's proprietary drivers. So what we need is to set up our environment to get the printer work.

If you are done what we need next is a printer manager. The best in our case is system-config-printer, which is a red-hat adaptation (hu-hu we are going to use redhat installer hehe); so KDE users should run:

emerge -av system-config-printer-kde

Xfce and gnome users can go with:

emerge -av system-config-printer-gnome

Once installation is done a reboot and cfg-update -u (needs gentoolkit) might be useful.

As setup packs are quite big let's start fetching it from http://support.lexmark.com/
look for your printer downloads and something that sounds like "Linux driver for RedHat Package Manager based distros". Save it on your box.

In the meanwhile we'll keep going, emerging a dependency of the installer:

emerge -av rpm

When download finishes move to the folder and untar the package:

tar -xf lexmark-[..].i386.rpm.sh.tar.gz

Now a handmade procedure is needed. A trouble in Lexmark installer tries to install the cups backends to the wrong place. So let's make a symbolic link to get these files to the right place:

ln -s /usr/libexec/cups /usr/lib/cups

We're almost done.

Now simple double click on the installer lexmark-[...].rpm.sh and follow the installation procedure. Turn you printer on, open your printer manager (KDE or gnome) from your application menu and follow the "New printer" procedure. You'll find the "lxnet" printer type and be able to complete install. To verify it's done print the test page.

Mission accomplished!

A little extra.

As I often look my bootup in verbose mode I saw that some rows in udev startup rule for lexmark printers generates a Warning for the SYSFS calls. If you want to suppress that output with no visible effect (at least in my case) you can:

nano /usr/lexinkjet/lxk09/etc/99-lexmark-09.rules [or your rule name]

and quote with # SYSFS rows.