I have a DNP DS-RX1HS photo printer for the occasional photobooth “gig” and every so often, I would like to print out some photos. When I do print photos, I would have get the image to a laptop and if I picked up the T430, I would have to reboot that into Windows otherwise there’s the MacBook Pro that is sometimes out of battery because it is an old laptop. I would like to get out of that business and print to the printer from whatever device I am working on.
Unfortunately DNP’s website offers drivers for Windows or macOS but not Linux. Since macOS uses CUPS I thought I could add the printer on Linux using its PPD. After looking at the PPD, it became apparent that this was not going to work. The PPD had calls to binaries such as rastertodnp and without the source I would not be able to recompile the binaries to work on Linux.
For kicks and giggles, I searched GitHub for “dnp ds rx1” to see if anyone has attempted something similar. I came across a few results that mentioned Gutenprint. Promising.
Looking at the ArchWiki for a page about Gutenprint, I installed the gutenprint and foomatic-db-gutenprint-ppds packages. Then I added the printer via the CUPS web interface since the system-config-printer utility kept throwing a client-error-not-possible error. I could add the printer using Gnome’s Printers settings panel, but I prefer to name the printers (ds-rx1hs).
Once the printer was added, I was able to print photos to the DS-RX1HS from Linux. There is also support for cutting the photos at the 2 inch/horizontally halfway point for photo strips which is NEAT. At this point, I am considering getting a RaspberryPi and set it up as a print server such that I am able to print photos to it from my desktop and/or my laptop.