Lexmark's Linux Secret

When navigating the downloads area of the Lexmark web-site for the Lexmark Pro905 Platinum all-in-one, the listed operating systems that are supported include OpenSUSE 11.0, OpenSUSE 11.1, Fedora 10, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 8.10. It is not exactly the most recent updated list of distributions, but we had no problems using the Ubuntu 8.10 package on Ubuntu 9.10. Well, on 32-bit. At this time, Lexmark does not provide any 64-bit driver for any Linux operating system. However, the 32-bit driver can be made to work. Moreover, as a quick side note, later this year Lexmark is expected to officially launch a 64-bit Linux driver with their 2010 printer line-up.

What makes it more difficult to install the 32-bit driver on 64-bit Linux is that Lexmark wraps their package (with Ubuntu, the Debian package) within a Loki/Mojo installer. When the installer detects you are on 64-bit Linux, the installation fails. However, this is an unofficial workaround for this as reported by one of the Lexmark engineers.

Prerequisite packages: ia32-libs, openjdk-6-jre

1. Get the latest driver
2. Untar driver
3. run in terminal "./lexmark-inkjet-09-driver-1.5.i386.deb.sh --noexec --target lexmark"
4. a "lexmark" (from --target) directory was created, "cd lexmark"
5. run in terminal "tar xvf instarchive_all --lzma"
6. run in terminal "dpkg -i --force-all lexmark-inkjet-09-driver-1.5-1.i386.deb"

Those are the steps to extract the Debian package manually and then force its installation on 64-bit Ubuntu. These steps worked just fine for us with Ubuntu 9.10, but it is rather unfortunate that in 2010 Lexmark still does not have any x86_64 drivers available.

Prior to installing the driver from Lexmark's web-site we had attempted to just setup the printer from Ubuntu's system-config-printer setup. The Pro905 printer was found on our WiFi network, but it did not have any driver support. Once we installed this driver, the printer setup process went just fine. The Pro905 Platinum was setup on our secured WiFi network.

The setup process on the printer itself was extremely easy using the touch-screen LCD. This process was easy and can easily be carried out by anyone. Our only complaint during the setup process was no 64-bit driver support or support by the Lexmark installer to force the 32-bit driver installation. It would also be nice if there were mainline support within Ubuntu for the Pro905 Platinum so that we would not even need to bother with downloading the driver from Lexmark.