Installing printer driver (xerox phaser 6000) rpm

General
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First I want to thank IBM, Red Hat and finally universal blue! I am already using bazzite for my gaming PC and it works… i :heart_on_fire: it!

For my laptop with AMD APU I am still using Fedora 41. So I want also switch to Aurora there. But I am a bit unsure how about using my printer. With all previous distris it worked pretty well by installing the “wrong” driver.

It is a Dell C1660W but I discovered that I can use it on linux with the Xerox Phaser 6000 driver as might be identical in construction. It’s connect over WLAN with a static IP.

As I had I believe problem one time on Manjaro I found out that I need this dependencies

  • cups - The Common UNIX Printing System
  • libcupsimage2 - CUPS library for working with large images
  • libcupsimage2-32bit - CUPS library for working with large images
  • libstdc++6 - The standard C++ shared library
  • libstdc++6-32bit - The standard C++ shared library
  • libpng16-16 - Library for the Portable Network Graphics Format (PNG)
  • libpng16-16-32bit - Library for the Portable Network Graphics Format (PNG)
  • libcups2 - HTTP/IPP communication and printer queue and job library
  • libcups2-32bit - HTTP/IPP communication and printer queue and job library
  • libtiff6 - The Tiff Library (with JPEG and compression support)
  • libtiff6-32bit - The Tiff Library (with JPEG and compression support)

I am pretty sure I will switch, I don’t use the printer often but when then I expect it to work.

So the question to me is will it work ootb, can someone say that? And if not what are my options? Maybe using a VM? Or even better a container?
Is it even possible that I just install the rpm and it works? And won’t it be removed after the next update or sth similar?

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Just came into my mind that I have another exotic hardware I keyboard.
The keyboard has to work!
It is the moonlander.

at least udev setting must be possible… so I can configure the keyboard.
Can also someone tell me if that will work?
As far as I understood it should… :thinking:

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@changoMarango You are definitely thinking along the right lines …

I started with bluefin by testing it in a VM first. That worked out really well. And then I moved to an external USB drive so I could get closer to the hardware before committing to reinstall on the internal nvme drive.

Because your printer is accessed via WiFi this should be a no brainer. I do have a couple of thoughts.

  • install in a VM first (using virt/qemu or Boxes) or external drive
  • you can install your driver via package overlays but this should be a last resort; but can be a powerful option. Just keep a good log of what you do so you can back it out if need be for an update; then reapply after update is done
  • It should also be possible to install it in a distrobox although there will be some complexity to exposing the pieces (in and out) that are needed. For example the device in /dev, the wifi device in /dev will probably be needed in the distrobox, and the host will need the software required to access the printer exported from the distrobox
  • also - do you really need the 32-bit stuff at this point? You might depending on the software you use. But that would reduce the problem slightly if you don’t really need them.

The keyboard should be a little easier. The /etc filesystem is read-write. You can modify or add anything you need in there. Just the /usr filesystem is read-only. See below for the link to an article I wrote summarizing how this works with ostree based systems.

So, adding /etc/udev/rules.d/50-zsa.rules is straight-forward.

The wally app is written in go and react (javascript). You should be able to install these pieces in your host $HOME dir structure. Place the wally.desktop file in ~/.local/share/applications/wally.desktop and GNOME will pick it up from there. I use ~/.local/bin and ~/.local/lib and ~/.local/lib64 for my local installs.

It was not immediately obvious what the app architecture of keymapp is like. But the install instructions suggest it is a go executable as well. I would put it in ~/.local/bin as well.

For the required dependencies, I would install them in a distrobox and export them into ~/.local/lib64 which should probably be in LD_LIBRARY_PATH:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/.local/lib64:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

It all sounds very doable. Hope my desktop exercise was helpful.

Here is the article link mentioned above:

Enjoy. Sounds like fun!

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We include this by default:

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Nice - I thought about having him check the dependencies against what is already installed but got in a hurry - workers showed up to install an attic fan :wink:

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Personally, if you’re doing this much additional works, I’d look into building your own images via the template or Blue Build.

When I was working at a company that allows me to bring my own device, I just added the printer packages on my image builder so I don’t need to layer. Though packages adding to /opt didn’t work back then - don’t know about now.

Personally, I’d recommend just adding gnome-boxes via layering and do usb-redirection. Though maybe the usb redirection work on Flatpak gnome-boxes now? Can anyone confirm?

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I use virt / qemu and use USB redirect with thumb drives all the time. Also for CD-ROM with MakeMKV flatpak.

I can confirm.

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thx a lot! Yes that helps me I will look into it :slight_smile:

the mentioned deps… if I need them all and also the 32bit… that is already some years ago… and I have really no idea

I am web backend developer but I have not much idea of these linux os c++ deps stuff… slowely understanding it a bit… in my recent job I am forced to use a mac… but the rest is alright :sweat_smile:

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also thx to all others…

distrobox… yes sounds very interesting I will try it with that

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@changoMarango

I have this repo oc-shared-images where I give some examples in a distrobox.ini file that exports executables.

Install the dependencies (gtk3, etc.) in a distrobox.

And if you install (and export) wally / keymapp inside the distrobox then you should only need to export the executables. It will find the dependencies because they are in the same container.

In my example, /usr/bin/gitk is exported which depends on the tk dnf package installed in Containerfile.fedora41-python. It is similar to wally in that regard.

distrobox assemble does some magic to make stuff available in the container. So it should be fairly straightforward to mount the devices that wally and keymapp need.

mount output in my fedora41-python-dx distrobox has 349 lines [expand to see] 
$ mount | wc -l
349

Here is a snippet of some of the mount magic - notice these are individual files / dirs ?

...
/dev/nvme0n1p3 on /usr/lib64/libnvidia-rtcore.so.570.133.07 type btrfs (ro,relatime,seclabel,compress=zstd:1,ssd,discard=async,space_cache=v2,subvolid=258,subvol=/root)
/dev/nvme0n1p3 on /usr/lib64/libnvidia-sandboxutils.so.570.133.07 type btrfs (ro,relatime,seclabel,compress=zstd:1,ssd,discard=async,space_cache=v2,subvolid=258,subvol=/root)
/dev/nvme0n1p3 on /usr/lib64/libnvidia-tls.so.570.133.07 type btrfs (ro,relatime,seclabel,compress=zstd:1,ssd,discard=async,space_cache=v2,subvolid=258,subvol=/root)
/dev/nvme0n1p3 on /usr/lib64/libnvidia-vksc-core.so.570.133.07 type btrfs (ro,relatime,seclabel,compress=zstd:1,ssd,discard=async,space_cache=v2,subvolid=258,subvol=/root)
/dev/nvme0n1p3 on /usr/lib64/libnvidia-wayland-client.so.570.133.07 type btrfs (ro,relatime,seclabel,compress=zstd:1,ssd,discard=async,space_cache=v2,subvolid=258,subvol=/root)
/dev/nvme0n1p3 on /usr/lib64/libnvoptix.so.570.133.07 type btrfs (ro,relatime,seclabel,compress=zstd:1,ssd,discard=async,space_cache=v2,subvolid=258,subvol=/root)
/dev/nvme0n1p3 on /usr/lib64/vdpau/libvdpau_nvidia.so.570.133.07 type btrfs (ro,relatime,seclabel,compress=zstd:1,ssd,discard=async,space_cache=v2,subvolid=258,subvol=/root)
/dev/nvme0n1p3 on /usr/local/share/themes type btrfs (ro,relatime,seclabel,compress=zstd:1,ssd,discard=async,space_cache=v2,subvolid=258,subvol=/root)
/dev/nvme0n1p3 on /usr/local/share/icons type btrfs (ro,relatime,seclabel,compress=zstd:1,ssd,discard=async,space_cache=v2,subvolid=258,subvol=/root)
/dev/nvme0n1p3 on /usr/local/share/fonts type btrfs (ro,relatime,seclabel,compress=zstd:1,ssd,discard=async,space_cache=v2,subvolid=258,subvol=/root)

All that is done for me by simply doing distrobox assemble - see my create.sh script.

A little learning curve, but I suspect you will find it not as difficult as it seems.

Enjoy.

11

sorry for the late reply, but I thank you all.

I just tried kvm with aurora + distrobox and also fedora… even was not possible to find the printer automatically but still my host could do.
I always got filter errors when I tried to print…
So I thought it could be of network problems because of NAT? So I looked up how to bridge it directly… but I did not found an easy way. I did not want to “learn” any new in that area as I already did earlier when I had much more time and almost already forgot everything because things like that I just need one time in years…

Nevertheless I decided to take the “risk” (I don’t print everyday… few days in a year).

So I just installed Aurora:

For syncthing I am using homebrew :+1:

Printer? I tried with distrobox but finally I run into the same problems as with kvm before. Filter error… No idea what could be missing and had no time to look up.
I was pretty sure that it just worked on fedora by installing the rpm and then adding the printer with corresponding driver… but maybe my memory is wrong.
Already used some time on it… no idea when I will try again… also as long I don’t need to print anything there not that much motivation, but I already learned sth… with lpadmin, lpinfo, … :sweat_smile:

Another pretty annoying problem I have and probably the culprit is vodafone.
As I have “1 gbit/s” download speed but not at all with ghcr and also flatpak?
So max is 1 Mbit/s and that takes “ages” (hours). By start updating after start, its possible when using 1h+ that it finishes
Regarding providers I don’t have that many choices…

Finally I am happy with it because it just works what was expected to work. The network problem is not the fault of universal blue. And one day I will get the printer working (I hope :sweat_smile:)
For me there are also some improvements like playing videos (did something wrong on codec installation)

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