Step by step guide

08 February 2010

This is a step by step guide to add a printer to a Linux machine. It has been tested on Kubuntu Linux 10.04. The main steps, however, should work on other flavours of Linux as well, with minimal modifications.

As a preparation, dowload the PPD file for your printer, and save it to your disk (we recommend to save them to a directory called e.g. Printers in your home directory. You should also check that the package hpijs is installed on your computer. You can install it on Debian-like Linuxes with the command apt-get install hpijs.

If you have finished the above preparations, go to http://localhost:631/ with a web browser. localhost:631 in firefox

There, click Administration:
If it asks for a username ans password, enter your username and password on the local computer (Ubuntu), or "root" and the root password, if it did not accept the username and password. localhost:631 in firefox

Click Add printer: localhost:631 in firefox

Choose the right connection type (i.e. the way the printer is connected to your computer) localhost:631 in firefox

Fill in the form (you can freely choose the printer name): localhost:631 in firefox

Click browse, and choose the previously saved PPD file. localhost:631 in firefox

Click Add printer to get to the options localhost:631 in firefox We have A4 paper in all printers. Please use double sided printing to save paper, and do not print a test page unless you really need one. Click set default options to save settings.