Printing to a HP Laserjet CP1025 on a Linux print server with CUPS

Almost 2 years ago, I bought a HP Laserjet CP1025. It was rather cheap. And it has crappy Linux support. Damn.

Every time I install a new Linux distribution, I have forgotten how to use this printer. So I might as well document it here.

If you want to attach your printer to your PC using the USB cable. It's not that difficult. You can install the hplip package, which is available in the Debian and Fedora repositories. Probably other distributions' as well. When you run hp-setup, you get an ugly gui tool to configure your printer, that downloads the correct freedom hating driver. But it works. (You can also run it in the console: hp-setup -i)

Now, where I live, I don't have room for a printer in the living room. So the printer is in the attic, attached to a Raspberry Pi print server. But for that to work, I need a client side printer driver. And that is a problem. The hplip tools don't want to believe me that there is a HP Laserjet CP1025 on the network. And I could not find out how to configure a CUPS network printer with the hplip drivers.

What you need, is the 'foo2zjs' printer driver. Which might be in your package repository. Which might even be already installed on your system. But don't use the one from the repositories! It does not work. I don't know why either.

So uninstall foo2zjs from your system, and compile it yourself. It is not hard to do. Go to the foo2zjs website, and scroll down to 'Download and install'. You only need to download the firmware for your printer model (in this case 1025).

Be careful now when you add your printer. The driver name is: HP LaserJet Pro CP1025nw Foomatic/foo2zjs-z3 (en). Which is, becasuse of the Pro in the name, on a completely different place in the alphabetical list than the other (nonfunctional) cp1025 drivers, which don't mention 'Pro'.