Total Noob Printer Installation Problem

[Brogden]

I have a friend who is using a little eMachine ER1401 Desktop with Linpus 9.5 Linux, which I don't think exists any longer. It is perfect for what he needs, which is just web and email. But now he wants to install a printer, a Lexmark X2670.

We plugged the printer into the machine with a USB cable. If I do lsusb in a terminal window I can see the Lexmark machine in the list. But CUPS, which was already installed, doesn't find any printer connected.

I am guessing that I need to download a UNIX printer driver, which is available from Lexmark, and install this so that CUPS can talk to the printer. Lexmark lists various drivers for Fedora, which I think Linpus is based on. Will one of these work, and are they backwards compatible, i.e. should I just choose the newest?

And once downloaded, how is it installed?

Sorry if this has been asked many time before, and thanks for any help!

[catgate]

Linpus is still alive and breathing,
So an uptodate version might have in it a driver for your Lexmark X2670, or alternatively you could change to a current Ubuntu or one of the other popular distros, which should have have most printer drivers in already.

[Dutch_Master]

No, you shouldn't just simply install the latest driver Lexmark is serving you. The Linpus version your friend is working on is based on an older version of Fedora (don't know which one). However, as Linpus is a commercial distro, it's quite feasible they want him to pay up in full for whatever support he wants/needs. You could try the upgrade path, if there's a free version available, and it might have the drivers pre-installed. However, this would be a good time to switch him to another distro, and because he already uses a Fedora based distro, Fedora itself would be the obvious choice. Mageia and CentOS are logical alternatives from the rpm-based camp. LinuxMint is advisable too.

[fraxinus]

Linpus is still alive and breathing,
So an uptodate version might have in it a driver for your Lexmark X2670, or alternatively you could change to a current Ubuntu or one of the other popular distros, which should have have most printer drivers in already.

Good advice.
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=linpus
Linpus is certainly still around. I was helping a friend with a similar problem a few years back with her eeePC 701. I couldn't update to a new version of Linpus, however, for the purely practical reason that the download mirror for the new ISO was so slow - it would have taken me days! So I switched to Xubuntu. Nowadays I'd look at one of the lighter Linux Mint options. Either Mint or Ubuntu will provide a huge range of printer drivers.