Dell 1350cnw on Gentoo Linux with CUPS

You’d think that a company that had produced and does produce some Linux based products would also provide CUPS drivers for their printers, like the Dell 1350cnw. Not so, it seems. Still, I was undeterred and found a way to make it happen.

First, download the driver for the Xerox Phaser 6000 in DEB format. Yeah, that’s right. We’re going to use a Xerox driver to print to our Dell printer.

Once you have it, do the following on the command line:

# unzip 6000_6010_deb_1.01_20110210.zip
# cd deb_1.01_20110210
# ar x xerox-phaser-6000-6010_1.0-1_i386.deb
# tar xf data.tar.gz
# gunzip usr/share/ppd/Xerox/Xerox_Phaser_6000B.ppd.gz
# mkdir -p /usr/lib/cups/filter/
# cp ~/deb_1.01_20110210/usr/lib/cups/filter/xrhkaz* /usr/lib/cups/filter/
# mkdir -p /usr/share/cups/Xerox/dlut/
# cp ~/deb_1.01_20110210/usr/share/cups/Xerox/dlut/Xerox_Phaser_6010.dlut /usr/share/cups/Xerox/dlut/

Or, because I’ve seen rumors that there are other flavors of Linux, if you’re on a distribution that supports DEB files, just initiate the install from the DEB file, however one does that.

Finally, add the Dell 1350cnw via the CUPS browser interface. (I used whichever one had “net” in the title as the printer is connected directly to the network.) Upload  ~/deb_1.01_20110210/usr/share/ppd/Xerox/Xerox_Phaser_6000B.ppd when prompted for a driver.

Everything works as expected for me, and in color!