Dell Laser Printer 1700 Setup in Gentoo Linux

It took me approximately 1/2 hour this morning to install the Dell Laser Printer 1700 under Gnome using gnome-cups-manager.

The page at linuxprinting.org was helpful in that it said to use the 'generic PCL6 driver'. Ensure that your /usr/src/linux/.config contains CONFIG_USB_PRINTER=[m|y] CONFIG_USB_SUPPORT=[m|y] CONFIG_USB=[m|y] In my kernel CONFIG_USB=y and CONFIG_USB_SUPPORT=y, but CONFIG_USB_PRINTER=m In /usr/src/linux, run make && make modules_install if necessary. Run 'modprobe usblp' Ensure that cups, gutenprint, and gnome-cups-manager are emerged. My USE="cups foomaticdb gtk ppds readline gimp X acl avahi dbus java jpeg ldap pam perl png ppds python samba ssl tiff zeroconf" but feel free to alter that, although in doing so, your mileage may vary. Now, if you power on your Dell Laser Printer 1700 and plug it in to your computer via USB, monitor the last few lines of dmesg with dmesg | tail -n 50 and you should see something like: usblp0: USB Bidirectional printer dev 2 if 0 alt 0 proto 2 vid 0x413C pid 0x5202 usbcore: registered new interface driver usblp Running 'lsusb' should report something like Bus 003 Device 002: ID 413c:5202 Dell Computer Corp. Go to System -> Administration -> Printing -> New Printer Select 'Use Detected Printer', then for Manufacturer use Generic, for Model use PCL 6/PCL XL Printer, and for Driver use 'gutenprint'. Now just ensure that the default paper size is Letter and print a test page. I should also mention that the default paper size was originally set to A4, which is more of a European standard. Subsequently, when I printed a test page I received a page that said PCL XL error Subsystem: KERNEL Error: IllegalTag Operator: 0x2d Position: 6986 However, adjusting the paper size to Letter inside the printer properties fixed this issue. Happy Printing :)