installation of foo2zjs for HP LaserJet 1020
I guess I’ll continue to blog about setting up Slackware 12 on my desktop. I’ve just installed the driver for my cheap Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 1020. I call it cheap; it’s a very low-end USB laser printer, but it does a great job for me. Don’t buy it from links on HP’s site, though — I got it from a big box retailer for a lot less than the price they quote.
The 1020 needs the foo2zjs driver written by Rick Richardson. It’s a little more complicated than most printer setups, because the 1020 doesn’t retain its firmware if it’s powered down; the firmware has to be reloaded each time. Mr. Richardson has put together a nice source package and great instructions that Just Work. On my laptop, I use Gentoo’s ebuild of foo2zjs even though he recommends against it. For Slackware, I compiled it and installed using his great instructions.
The source tarball comes with no configure script; you start by running make to compile foo2zjs. Then to get the firmware and some other needed stuff, he has provided a nice script. ./getweb 1020 grabbed what was needed from his website. After that, make install puts the object files where they need to be.
At this point, Mr. Richardson’s job should be done, but he’s gone a couple of extra miles. He’s written udev rules to load the firmware whenever the printer is plugged in, and he’s provided a script to put them into udev’s config directory. Not only that, he’s provided a script to restart the cups daemon so that it will see the new printer.
Thanks to his work, after downloading, it took me about three minutes to go from compiling to printing a test page.