Munckfish.net

I inherited an HP LaserJet 1020 from the previous owner of my house. I found the drivers for Windows on the net and got it working fine, I really liked it (and so did my wife cause it prints quicker than my HP-PSC-1210). However, in June I migrated to Ubuntu 6.06 as my primary OS and couldn’t get it to work with the 1020.

My first attempt was to try the HPLIP drivers however, I noticed the 1020 listed in their unsupported devices page. On further investigation I found a note about it in their FAQ - apparently they consider the 1020 a “non-standard host based printer” and they don’t plan to support it.

Then I found a page on it on LinuxPrinting.org which pointed me to the foo2zjs project which is a linux printer driver for the ZjStream protocol which is what the 1020 uses apparently. Various posts on the Ubuntu forums also direct to this project for 1020 support. This post seems to be the best of the lot.

The process I followed in the end was to download the most current version of foo2zjs and compile and install it from source. This worked but I’m not 100% happy with this setup as it requires uninstallation of the ubuntu packaged version of foo2zjs which also forces uninstallation of the ubuntu-desktop meta package. I also tried to install it using checkinstall so that I could manage the installation using apt/synaptic but the dpkg installation process kept failing reporting that foo2zjs was

trying to overwrite
`/usr/share/foomatic/db/source/driver/foo2hp.xml’,
which is also in package foomatic-db

Here are the exact steps I took in the end, based on the instructions from various places:

• Build and install foo2zjs

• Run gnome-cups-manager (System > Adminstration > Printing) and add a new printer. It had already found my 1020 so I accepted the defaults all the way through the wizard.
• Unplug (if not already) and then plug in the 1020
• Print a test page (can be found from the gnome-cups-manager printer properties page).