Officejet 5510 and CUPS-lpd/CUPS – problem and solution

[Anonymous]

Hi,

As an advanced linux administrator, I thought that sharing an Officejet 5510 using Cups via lpd on my Fedora Core 4 server with XP laptops would be trivial.  After quickly setting up the cups and cups-lpd with printtool, I ended up wrestling with this for days and thought I would share my experience to (hopefully) save someone else some time.

The trick is that the OfficeJet 5510 driver does not show up in the ‘add new printer’ wizard for XP, you can’t add it from the CD, and you can’t just use the ‘Officejet’ driver that comes with XP.  Instead, you need to:

1 – Install the officejet 5510 software on the XP client computers, as though you were going to use the printer via USB.
2 – Setup the linux server for lpd via printtool.  Don’t forget to ‘yum install cups-lpd’
3 – Add an arbitrary lpd printer that points to the linux server:
	a)  “Add a printer” from the printer control panel
	b)  “Local printer attached to this computer” – Don’t check the automatically dectect box!
	c)  “Create a new port” of type “Standard TCP IP Port”. . . if that option doesn’t appear, google around.  It’s built into XP, but I forget if you have to do something to make it appear.
	d)  Put in your linux server’s IP address and hit next, select “custom,”, change the protocol to LPR and put in the queue name for the printer you setup in #2
	e)  When you scroll through the manufacturers and printers, you won’t see the officejet 5510 listed.  Annoying, since you already installed it. Just pick anything basic (Apple Laserwriter NT, for example) and complete the printer wizard without printing a test page.
4 – Go back into the printers and faxes control panel, right-click the printer you just added, and go to the ‘advanced’ tab – if you click on the ‘driver’ entry, you can now scroll through the list and select ‘hp officejet 5500 series’.  Classic buggy MS BS.  Hit OK.
5 – At this point a box will come up and warn you that you don’t have the driver installed and ask you if you want to install it, now.  Don’t do anything!  In the background, the HP installer should start going through several gyrations that are setting up the printer.  When this activity stops, you can safely hit ‘No’. . . now print a test page.  You should be done, and you have full control of the printer (not the scanner, etc) from the properties tab from programs in windows.

I wished someone had told me about this!

DrC.