Setting up a new small office and landlord said we could have/use an old Ricoh Aficio MP2000 multifunction printer that was in the space. Figured it probably had something wrong with it that would make it unusable, but gave it a try. Figured out that Ricohs (at least this model) have a default user administration username of “supervisor” with null (not the word null, a blank) for the password, and was able to set up an admin user to log in and get to the settings via a web browser.

But when I printed a test page from my MacBook Pro I got many many pages of ASCII gibberish. I think I have seen this problem before, but not sure I remember ever sorting it out. I tried looking at settings in CUPS (Common Unix Operating System, first enable in Terminal, with “cupsctl Webinterface=yes”, then go to 127.0.0.1:631), but no joy there.

Turns out the Ricoh printer drivers are Postscript printer drivers, and apparently many fancier printers only have Postscript as an expensive option, which this particular printer did not have. But after poking around a bit I found that The Linux Foundation has PCL drivers for many of these “high end” printers, the PPDs are in a package called pxlmono, and a couple of other packages need to be installed for the pxlmono drivers to work (Foomatic-RIP and Ghostscript, details at http://bit.ly/XhbhJE). I uninstalled the Ricoh Postscript drivers, installed the pxlomo drivers, and off to the races!