Configuring 2009 Lexmark printers with 64 bit Fedora

by Walter Francis — last modified Jan 01, 2011 12:40 AM

— filed under: Post-Install Solutions, Multimedia Solutions, Desktop

Lexmark is finally supporting their new (2009 or later) inkjet printers in Fedora and a few other distributions, and they work pretty well. However they do not officially support 64 bit and the installer fails unless you install some 32 bit libraries. This guide explains the correct libraries to install, and if any caveats are found they will also be listed here.

Applicable to Fedora Versions

Fedora 13 or higher

Requirements

This guide does not apply to printers earlier than 2009, those printers may use the older "Lexmark SDK" but that is outside of this document. This document assumes a 2009 (or later) model Lexmark inkjet printer. This guide does not apply to Lexmark lasers as they typically they do not need any special drivers. This guide should work for USB or Network attached printers. This guide is not necessary for those using 32 bit installations as the installer should work without any tweaks on those systems.

A 2009 Model Lexmark inkjet printer supporting Linux
Basic yum skills and use of su

Doing the Work

The only real required work within Fedora is to install the required libraries. Installing the driver depends on your printer model, but we'll mention that step to be clear when to do so. For those who are curious, yes a yum localinstall could find any dependencies of this nature in most cases of simply having a 32 bit RPM, however Lexmark has the actual RPM packaged inside of a Lua installer and also uses a separate Java RE which has its own requirements. The following information was found with a bit of trial and error.

Install required 32 bit libraries. Note this will pull in some number of dependencies, but this is life with multilib and should cause you no other problems:

su -c 'yum install cups-libs.i686 glibc.i686 ncurses-libs.i686 libusb.i686 libXext.i686 libXtst.i686 libXi.i686'

Uncompress and xecute the Lexmark installation:

tar zxf your-driver.rpm.sh.tar.gz
sh -c 'sh your-driver.rpm.sh'

Troubleshooting

How to test

At this point, you should be able to print to the printer, network or USB. I have not yet been able to get scanning to work over the network but it might not be a supported function. Scanning should work over USB using SANE but I have not tested this as I am network attached to my printer. I will update this guide if I get more information in this area, but I personally do not scan much so I have not looked into it much yet. Simply try to print from any program, Open Office, etc. The driver should have set up a CUPS printer for you and it should just work.

Common problems and fixes

No known problems at this time, unless my inability to network scan is a problem related to another missing 32 bit library. If I find more, I'll update.

More Information

This makes my printer work, and it prints fine. I have not printed extensively, but I typically don't do a lot of printing at home. FYI the networked printers also have SNMP, internal web servers, etc, and you can monitor and set things via either mechanism. At this time I don't know any specific information on Linux from Lexmark, but as I discover that I will add any relevant information to this guide.

This guide does not intend to go into any specifics about acquiring or using the drivers. As far as I know, the drivers will be made available on the Lexmark website, but are not provided in the box with the printer. It should be easy enough to locate the drivers by navigating through the Lexmark website looking for your specific printer model.

Disclaimer

We test this stuff on our own machines, really we do. But you may run into problems, if you do, come to #fedora on irc.freenode.net

Added Reading

http://www.lexmark.com

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