Kubuntu 7.04 versus the KONICA MINOLTA magicolor 2530DL

Konica Minolta supplies Linux drivers for the magicolor 2530DL on their website. I thought maybe I would be able to install these drivers on a Linux system, connect to the printer over the network, and have everything Just Work^TM.

I was wrong.

I installed Konica Minolta’s RPM on SuSE 10.1 OSS and did manage to print, but my system would never respect my paper size setting of “Letter”. The little LCD on the magicolor would saying something like ERROR: SIZE MISMATCH, then print out an oddly-formatted rendition of my document. When this has happened with other printers, changing the default paper size from A4 to Letter fixes the problem. In this case, every method of enforcing paper size that I could find did not work.

Moving to my Kubuntu 7.04 system, I found that CUPS already had a 2530DL driver in stock. This driver did not work.

So it was time to roll up my sleeves, download the driver source code from Konica Minolta, and get to work. In the end, I feel like I’ve sort of stapled the driver onto my system, but at least it works.

First, you should install some packages:

libcupsys2-dev
liblcms1-dev
liblcms-utils

I may be leaving some off; at one point I was madly installing any CUPS-related development packages I could find in the Adept Manager.

Now you need the jbig library which is apparently obscure enough to not be in many package repositories (I stumbled upon a link it on this page. Here is how I downloaded and installed the library:

wget http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/download/jbigkit-1.5.tar.gz
tar zxf jbigkit-1.5.tar.gz
cd jbigkit
make
sudo cp -r libjbig /usr/local/lib/
sudo cp libjbig/libjbig.a /usr/local/lib/

At last we can install the driver. You need to grab the source from Konica Minolta, unpack it, then jump into the source directory:

cd magicolor2530DL-2.1.0/
./configure \
LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/lib/libjbig \
CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/local/lib/libjbig
sudo make install
# I don't know why it put in in lib64
sudo cp -a /usr/lib64/cups/filter/rastertokm2530dl /usr/lib/cups/filter
sudo /etc/init.d/cupsys restart

Now go to your printer administration page and add the printer. I’m not going to walk through the steps, but there are two important things to keep in mind:

• I had to use a socket URI (example: socket://192.168.1.69:9100)
• I had to manually specify the location of the PPD: /usr/share/cups/model/KONICA_MINOLTA/km2530dl.ppd.gz

Now print! Print like you’ve never printed before!