I have a Deskjet 722C that my wife and I bought in 1998, and the thing just won’t die. The printer is so reliable that I bought a second one a year ago for $10. The second one is installed at my office, and my coworkers prefer printing to it rather than the laser.

At home for the last couple years, I’ve had it connected via parallel cable to my D-Link DI-704p router. I had used this as my primary broadband router, but when I switched from DSL to cable and got Vonage, I got the Linksys WRTP54G voip (Vonage) wireless router. I set a static IP address on the old D-Link, plugged it in lan to lan against the Linksys, and have been using it only as a print server only. All my windows machines (which are all wireless) have been printing to it fine.

When I first built the Ubuntu rig, I tried connecting, but could never get it to print. So, today I plugged the printer directly into Ubuntu and… still couldn’t print. To make a long story short, I had to manually edit the printer driver’s config file (/etc/pnm2ppa.conf) - so that it includes the version number.

Before:
version
#version 720 # 710, 712, 722 also acceptable
#version 820
#version 1000

After:
version 722
#version 720 # 710, 712, 722 also acceptable
#version 820
#version 1000

Once I got it printing over parallel, I connected the printer back to the D-Link. I then setup a network printer in Ubuntu, set it to the D-Link’s IP address and print queue (which is “lp”), and yay! Network printing!

So, here’s my network. Cable modem connects to the Linksys WRTP54G, which does all routing, DHCP, wireless, etc. The D-Link DI-704p plugs in for printing, and the SMC 2655W 802.11b wireless access point also plugs in for more wireless. The old SMC 802.11b is a much more reliable connection than the new Linksys 802.11g, so I continue to use it. My Ubuntu box is the only PC plugged directly into the Linksys router, my wife’s windows notebook and daughter’s win desktop (and my work notebook if I ever bring it home) are wireless to the SMC.