Dell A920 Printer (aka Lexmark Z600) in Ubuntu Gutsy

After a fresh install of Gutsy, I don’t have the correct printer driver for our closed-piece-of-junk Dell A920 “All-In-One” printer (which is actually a Lexmark Z600-something with the dell logo stamped on it). If I remember correctly, in previous Ubuntus I just selected the Lexmark Z600 driver and everything worked fine. Now the driver is not there, and there are no easy point-and-click solutions. So, I googled the problem and found about twenty slightly different variants of the same solution. Many of them did not work in Gutsy, but this one did. This was my experience:

1. Installed alien (will need it to convert the .rpm drivers)

$ sudo aptitude install alien

2. Downloaded Lexmark’s RedHat CJLZ600LE-CUPS-1.0-1.TAR.gz driver for the Z600 series. Made a directory to put the tar.gz file in.

3. Used gksudo to run xterm (so I don’t have to keep typing sudo), and navigated to the directory containing the new file.

4. Ran the script with an option specifying the target directory (for some bizarre reason it doesn’t work if you don’t specify the target; the script made the target directory on its own):

# sh z600cups-1.0-1.gz.sh -target rpms

# cd rpms

# ls

5. Used alien to turn the rpms into debs

# alien z600cups-1.0-1.i386.rpm

# alien z600llpddk-2.0-1.i386.rpm

# ls

6. Installed the debs with dpkg. Note: For some reason the names of the .deb files are slightly different from the names of the rpm files (an underscore instead of a dash, and a 2 instead of a 1 on the end of the version numbers!) This confused me for a second, because I was cut-and-pasting file names from previous commands.

# dpkg -i z600cups_1.0-2.i386.deb

# dpkg -i z600llpddk_2.0-2_i386.deb

7. Done with the terminal, it’s GUI from here on in!! My printer was plugged into the USB port and was recognized by Gutsy as a Dell A920, but no working driver was assigned to it yet. To do this, I clicked on System > Administration > Printing to bring up the Printer configuration window. On the left, there was an item called A920 under Local Printers. Selected the A920 and then clicked the “Change” button to the right of Make and Model. Selected Lexmark, and clicked Forward>; then selected the new Z600 driver that was now available in the list and clicked Forward>; then clicked Forward> again, leaving the Copy settings over option checked, and tada it works! I also clicked the Make Default button to make this my default printer. Printed test page and it worked flawlessly.

I haven’t tried the built-in scanner in Gutsy yet but I’m assuming it will not work. Never has.