High Quality Printing Centos 5

In a continuing process of trying to improve my Centos5 installation. This how-to will detail howto get those difficult printers to work in Linux. In my case i have the Canon IP5000 and i can honestly say it works as good as it does on windows. To verify if your printer will work consider looking at the http://www.linuxprinting.org/ website to see which version of Gutenprint will work fo you.

Gutenprint supports a wide variety of Epson Stylus, HP DeskJet, Canon BubbleJet, Lexmark inkjet printers, PCL laser printers, and Canon, Fujifilm, Sony, Olympus dye sublimation printers. Its primary goal is uncompromising quality. Epson Stylus printers in particular are supported in all resolutions and modes, and the latest printers are capable of producing prints that rival photographic prints in quality. This package also offers much faster printing for high quality text and presentation graphics when required.

Gutenprint is the successor of Gimp-Print, it was renamed with the change from version 4.x to 5.x. All printers which worked with Gimp-Print before, work also (and hopefully better) with Gutenprint.

Step 1

mkdir -p /usr/share/ppd
ln -s /usr/share/ppd /usr/share/cups/model/0-driverppds

Step 2

Download Drivers from the website make sure to get the latest.

wget http://www.openprinting.org/download/printdriver/RPMS/i486/gutenprint-5.0.1-1lsb3.1.i486.rpm

Step 3

Restart the Cups Printing Deamon.

service cups restart

*** Note if using Selinux you will need to create an Selinux policy for this to work properly. ***

You should now be able to print using cups to your Printer assuming its listed in the Gutenprint driver.