Dell 1250c / Xerox 6010N colour laser printer

This printer was on sale in my local supermarket for what seemed like a good price, so I checked whether it was supported under Linux, found out it was, and bought one.

Once I got it home and plugged it in, I found out what Dell means by "supported under Linux".

It means "we'll give you a pre-compiled closed-source binary driver which is only available as 32-bit code".

Yes: in 2016, they have no support for 64-bit systems.

Fortunately Debian (and I daresay, other distros too, I just don't know) have made it quite a bit easier in recent years to run a mixed 32-bit/64-bit system, so it's now not that hard to have an up-to-date 64-bit machine with almost entirely 64-bit software on it, yet still be able to run legacy code such as the closed-source printer driver from Dell/Xerox.

http://douglask.fog.org/home/xerox-phaser-6010n was the page which helped get me up and running, quite easily.

This is what I did:

• Download the DEB driver from Xerox' support site.
• Enable 32-bit multiarch support on your machine:

  # dpkg --add-architecture i386

• Update the package list:

  # aptitude update

• Install the 32-bit CUPS package along with its dependencies (it installed 31 packages in total on my Devuan Jessie system):

  # aptitude install libstdc++6:i386 libcups2:i386 libcupsimage2:i386

• Install the closed-source driver from Xerox:

  # dpkg -i xerox-phaser-6000-6010_1.0-1_i386.deb

• Add the printer to your system, either through CUPS directly, or via your System Config tool if you prefer. I used CUPS:
  • open a browser and go to http://localhost:631
  • click on "Administration" at the top
  • click on "Add Printer"
  • enter the username "root" and the root password when prompted
  • if you plugged the printer into one of your computer's USB ports, and the printer is turned on, you should see it listed under "Local Printers" - select it
  • in my case it's attached via a Netgear PS121 USB Print Server, so I select "LPD/LPR Host or Printer"
  • on the next screen I enter the URL for the Print Server; in my case this is lpd://192.168.36.20/Dell1250c_P1 and then click on Continue
  • enter the requested details for Name, Description and Location; click on Continue
  • from the list of printer types, select Xerox and Continue
  • from the list of printer models, select "Xerox Phaser 6010N v1.0 (en)" and click "Add Printer"
  • click on "Set Default Options" and you should shortly see a screen for "Dell1250c (Idle, Accepting Jobs, Not Shared)"
  • select Maintenance and Print Test Page, and you should get a piece of paper out of the printer (you did put some paper in to start with, I hope…)

You now have a Dell 1250c colour laser printer running under 64-bit Devuan Linux (or Debian, perhaps).

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