Bought a new printer this week, the HP CM1015. My 15 year old HP LaserJet 4MP was still working fine, but getting a bit slow and doesn't handle larger jobs anymore. But my HP OfficeJet 1175c broke down, doesn't power up anymore. Probably easy to fix, if you know how.

Anyway, I now have a colour laserjet. Reported Drawbacks are to be that it is somewhat slow and doesn't have a document feeder. For me it is probably faster than what I had, and I used the OfficeJet document feeder only twice a year or so.

The biggest issue is that it had to work with FreeBSD. Although I found some references on the Internet, nothing really helped. But here some tips for people to get it going on FreeBSD 6.3. First install cups with "portinstall cups".

To access the admin page from a machine on the network, make sure cupsd.conf has a proper Listen entry.

Lastly, I had to add a "Allow From 192.168.1." entry to all <Location> sections, so I could configure cups from my local machine.

Adding the printer wasn't too hard. I installed two versions, the default Color Laserjet Series PCL6, and a Postscript version using a custom PPD I found on the internet. Output seems to be the same, but it seems the PPD has better defaults. The CUPS PCL driver for example defaults to 300 dpi while this is a 600 dpi printer.

Getting it to print required some modifications. It's a USB printer, so I had to set the permissions on /dev/ultp:

chgrp cups /dev/ulpt0
chmod g+w /dev/ulpt0

Restart the cupsd daemon, and I could at least print a test page.

After that I installed two more printers, using the same drivers, but this time enabled the black and white options. The PCL didn't turn off the B&W, while the PPD driver did indeed print in B&W.

UPDATE: oops, that's wrong. Changing permissions doesn't work, because when the printer is turned off and turned on the device disappears with its permissions. The correct way to set the permissions is here.