Ubuntu 6.10 Print Server with HP PSC 1610

The next step in my process of setting up my Ubuntu server was to connect my HP PSC 1610 printer/scanner to the server and then share it out via Samba to my laptops.

First step, connect the printer to the server via USB.

Second step, make sure the USB cable is actually plugged into the printer. This would have saved me some time later :-)

Add the printer. At this point the printer should work locally. I was also able to scan using XSane (Applications/Graphics/XSane).

The rest of this assumes you have Samba and Cupsd installed. I did by default.

First, I had to edit the cupsd configuration as follows (I use vi as my editor, gedit seems to be what most Ubuntu documentation suggests, but I've learned enough editors already. Replace "vi" with "gedit" if you want).

sudo -s
cd /etc/cups
cp cupsd.conf cupsd.conf.backup
vi cupsd.conf

And change the following lines:

# Only listen for connections from the local machine.
Listen 631

to the following:

# Allow network connections to port 631
Port 631

Then find the following block:

<location>
Order allow, deny
....
</location>

And add the following line into it. If your local subnet address is not 192.168.1.x then replace that appropriately (sorry, you're on your own here, I assume you know your local network configuration):

Allow From 192.168.1.*

Then I restarted cupsd (not sure if this was necessary):

/etc/init.d/cupsys restart

At that point remote printing worked as well. The only real problem is finding a printer driver that works with my PSC1610. Since it's a all-in-one printer/scanner/copier HP doesn't seem to provide a simple print driver. On my windows box I use the driver for the HP DeskJet 1600C which works ok, but not perfectly. If someone knows the right solution to this, please leave a comment.