Dell 1250c

Introduction

This is a brief tutorial to make the Dell 1250c Colour Laser printer work on Arch Linux.

Download Printer drivers

The printer drivers are not part of any package, you you need to download them and install them manually. There is no native driver, so use the Xerox Phaser 6000B driver.

First create a temporary directory.

$mkdir ~/tmp

Then you must download the official drivers from the Xerox website into that directory. Click Driver Download (and agree to their terms). This is an RPM archive.

Unzip the downloaded .zip file

$ unzip 6000_6010_rpm_1.01_20110222.zip
$ cd rpm_1.01_20110222

Extracting the RPM files

Now you need a small script called rpmextract which allows you to get the files included in the RPM you've just downloaded. Log in as root and execute :

# pacman -S rpmextract

Extract both RPM files :

$ rpmextract.sh Xerox-Phaser_6000_6010-1.0-1.i686.rpm

It should give you a directory : usr

Copy all of the files to their corresponding directories in your file system :

# cp -r /home/user/tmp/usr/* /usr

Installing the driver and printer

Now go to the CUPS page : http://localhost:631/

You should now be able to add the printer

Troubleshooting

For x86_64 installations, the cups 32bit client library is also needed

# pacman -S lib32-libcups lib32-gnutls lib32-nettle

As of May 2015, the libraries that the Xerox binary filter depend upon are no longer installed. This results in the following error messages in /var/log/cups/error_log:

# error while loading shared libraries: libgnutls.so.28: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
# error while loading shared libraries: libnettle.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

To fix this, get a copy of lib32-gnutls-3.3.13-1 and lib32-nettle-2.7.1-1, extract the libraries from them, and put the libraries somewhere in the library path.

See also