Sean’s Blog

A while ago, I wrote up a piece on how to install a Dell 720 Printer in Ubuntu. Last weekend, after a reinstall of Linux, I found my printer didn’t work. “No problem”, I thought, “I’ll just follow my own tutorial”. To my absolute horror, when I tried to do it, it didn’t work. So I started sifting through the message boards, and found alot of old info that didn’t help. Finally, I was able to get everything squared away, so without further ado, here is the updated and correct Howto for installing a Dell 720 Photo Printer under Ubuntu 7.10.

I got this printer free when I bought my computer a while ago and it turns out that the Dell 720 is a rebranded Lexmark. Lexmark does not offer drivers for Ubuntu, so we will need to get the linux drivers built for RedHat.
Download the drivers from Lexmark here(link opens in a new window).

Now that we have the drivers, we need to extract them and convert them.

1. Open a command shell. (actual commands are in bold)
2. Extract the drivers with tar
   1. tar xzvf CJLZ600LE-CUPS-1.0-1.TAR.gz
3. Now we need to extract the drivers from the install script since it is built for Redhat
   1. tail -n +143 z600cups-1.0-1.gz.sh > install.tar.gz
   2. tar xvzf install.tar.gz
4. We will now change the RPMs to DEB packages so Ubuntu can install them using alien
   1. sudo alien -k z600llpddk-2.0-1.i386.rpm
   2. sudo alien -k z600cups-1.0-1.i386.rpm
5. Now we have the files as .deb, which we can install on Ubuntu
   1. sudo dpkg -i z600llpddk-2.0-1.i386.deb
   2. sudo dpkg -i z600cups-1.0-1.i386.deb
6. Now we are ready to install the actual printer
   1. Open the Printer Control Panel System->Administration->Printing
   2. Add New Printer
   3. Choose the Lexmark z600 driver
   4. Print a test page

That should be it.