February « 2009 « zlOwram

[Tutorial] Installing your USB printer in Debian with CUPS

12 02 2009

As I’ve recently moved from Ubtuntu to Debian, i needed to install and configure my printer.

Here I describe the general method install a printer, because depending on your Desktop Environment it may intall it by itself. But, anyways, I strongly recommend to install the printer with the following method as, in my case, my KDE 4.2 didn’t configure it well at all.

Lets start:

In the latest distros of Debian, the CUPS system is installed by default with your desktop environment, if you don’t have it, start from step 1 else go to step 2.

```
$ aptitude install cupsys cupsys-client
```
Now that you have the CUPS system installed, you’ll need to get a good driver for your printer. Go to http://openprinting.org/printer_list.cgi and look the manufactured and model and click show. Look for yours, and click on it. You’ll get a blue box with a place inside that says “Recommended driver”. Go and download the latest .deb package.
Once, you get the package, we proceed to install it. Open it with your preferred package manager and install it. Satisfy the dependencies if necessary.
Now, open the CUPS interface by entering this URL on your web browser: http://localhost:631/ and you’ll see something like the image “Page1″:

Page 1

Page 2

Page 3

Page 4

Page 5
Now go to “Add printer”, and you’ll get “Page 2″. Just fill the form and click on continue. Now you are at “Page 3″, select your printer on the dropdown menu, you’ll see that the caption is something meaningful.Then click on “contiune”. At “Page 4″ you have a list of the drivers available with one highlighted. This one is the recommended by the system and it’s fine for you. Now click on “Add printer”. Now you’ll be redirectioned to “Page 5″. Here enter the configuration settings you want for your printer and click on “Set printer options”.
Now there’s one step more. You have to add you to the group “lpadmin”. You can do that simply by running as root the following command on a terminal:
```
$ usermod -Ga lpadmin YourUserNameHere
```
Now you’re done! You have your printer completely installed and configured. Feel free to print something