Lexmark and Linux

A few weeks ago, I contacted Lexmark’s technical support to note my disappointment that no Linux drivers were available for the X6675 and other such consumer products. Many home offices use these types of machines and Linux (specifically Ubuntu) is starting to show up more. My point to their technical support group was that since they already had a fully developed Mac OS X driver, it should probably be a reasonably short cycle to also have a Linux driver.

In the past when I’ve contacted Lexmark about the lack of Linux support on their low-end and consumer machines, I’ve basically been told, “Sorry, we only support Linux on business-class products. Consumers do not run Linux.” That’s the gist of what is said, not a direct quote.

Imagine my surprise a couple of weeks ago when I was browsing Lexmark’s site and found a genuine driver for the X6675. Printing was now possible, although I’m not sure about scanning (I have a dedicated scanner for those needs). A huge bonus for those of us using Linux as I can now have a printer that is shared through the network with all the Windows machines and doesn’t require a serious hack to make it work. A couple of caveats, though. The driver is currently 32-bit only (just use the command-line options to force it to install anyway) and the system expects you to connect via USB cable during installation. Just exit at that point and possibly re-install the printer if necessary to get the wireless functionality. I use our X6675 with both 32 bit and 64 bit Linux using wireless (on both the PC end and the printer end) with no problems at all.

Kudos, Lexmark!

5 thoughts on “Lexmark and Linux

  1. Hi Brian,

    I came across your post about installing the X6675 drivers for Ubuntu, and you mentioned running them on 64 bit.
    I have previously got these to work, but I’m now trying to install on a fresh machine and I’m failing. I would really appreciate it if you could take a few moments to give me a few pointers as to how you went about this using the 32 bit files supplied by Lexmark.

    I look forward to hearing from you.

    Regards,

    Richard.

    • Well, so much for the kudos. After seeing your post, I took the latest version of the drivers from Lexmark’s web site (Ubuntu 10.04 and Ubuntu 10.10) and attempted to install on my (X)ubuntu 15.04 installation. They’ve screwed around with the installer script to the point that the drivers will no longer install on X86_64, only on X86. So far, I haven’t found a good solution. I hadn’t really been following it much since my post in 2010 as I use a different scanner and printer. However, I still have the X6675 and haven’t yet been able to get the driver working after about 4 hours of attempts. Personally, I would highly recommend purchasing a different printer if you intend to use anything other than Windows, as even their Mac support seems somewhat poor. I have a Brother HL-2270DW that I’ve been using almost as long and Brother has continued to provide Linux support. Sorry this isn’t more help; if I figure out how to get the thing to work, I’ll update.

  2. Hi.
    Believe it or not, I’m still tinkering with this problem, and I found your website again and was reminded that I dropped a comment in there. Many thanks for your response and apologies for the delay in thanking you.
    I know it’s possible. I found some guy with a blog somewhere months ago that gave some specific command line instructions that worked a charm. The instructions downloaded a driver from Lexmark’s ftp site. I can’t for the life of me find the blog now though and I’m kicking myself as I thought I had bookmarked it.
    I’m bookmarking this page, and when I find the solution, I’ll post back here.
    All the best,
    Richard.

  3. Well, I have a solution.

    I did the following:

    sudo apt-get install ia32-libs xz-lzma

    wget http://downloads.lexmark.com/downloads/cpd/lexmark-08z-series-driver-1.0-1.i386.deb.sh.tar.gz -O lexmark-08z-series-driver-1.0-1.i386.deb.sh.tar.gz

    tar xzvf lexmark-08z-series-driver-1.0-1.i386.deb.sh.tar.gz

    ./lexmark-08z-series-driver-1.0-1.i386.deb.sh –noexec –target lexmark

    cd lexmark

    tar xJvf instarchive_all

    dpkg-deb -I lexmark-08z-series-driver-1.0-1.i386.deb

    mkdir raw-lexmark-archive

    dpkg-deb –raw-extract lexmark-08z-series-driver-1.0-1.i386.deb raw-lexmark-archive

    sed -i “/^ $/d” raw-lexmark-archive/DEBIAN/control

    cat raw-lexmark-archive/DEBIAN/control

    dpkg-deb -b ./raw-lexmark-archive fixed-lexmark-08z-series-driver-1.0-1.i386.deb

    sudo dpkg -i fixed-lexmark-08z-series-driver-1.0-1.i386.deb

    As per the instructions at this thread: http://askubuntu.com/questions/130516/how-do-i-install-drivers-for-a-lexmark-x6675-printer

    However, there was still a problem. The CUPS error logs suggested a missing library, libcups.so.2
    So:
    sudo apt-get install libcups2:i386

    New error message in CUPS logs, now libcupsimage.so.2 is missing Install with:

    sudo apt-get install libcupsimage2:i386

    …And it was good to go. Hope this helps any other readers of your blog with the same problem.

    Regards,

    Richard.

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