Reason #682 Why I Get Frustrated with IBM

An application developer down the hall came in the office late yesterday asking if I could install the HP LaserJet 4000 printer drivers on one of our IBM AIX servers. "Sure, no problem," I said, knowing in my core I was about to embark on a painful adventure.

This morning, I set about trying to locate the printer drivers on IBM's website. Fifteen minutes of thrashing about... no deal. They link to a huge list of some Infoprint driver crap, but nothing for HP printers.

I checked out HP's website, which is almost as poorly designed as IBM's. IBM's is worse because not only is the design bad, but they don't let you download anything useful. HP has lots of useful stuff on their website, but it's just really hard to find.

Anyway, after a few minutes of thrashing on HP's website, I found they have some generic un*x drivers for the LaserJet 4000 series, but I knew that wasn't going to fly on the AIX server. I needed the *.rte files from IBM.

I turned to Google, and found many posts to technical forums, and each one went like this:

Question: Where on the web can I find HP printer drivers for IBM?

Answer: You can't. I think they're on the installation CDs somewhere.

I then dove into my storage cabinet and pulled out my big box o' AIX cds. I located the AIX 5.2 install cds (seven of them) for that server as well as numerous other randomly labeled media. I popped the first CD into my Mac and started searching for something that looked like printer drivers. About this time, the developer guy popped in and said that his vendor said it was on disc one. Hmmm... okay.

Longer story shorter, it's not. It's disc three. I'll say it again so try to make sure Google picks it up for you out there searching the web. The HP LaserJet 4000 series printer drivers for AIX 5.2 are on installation cd number 3 of 7.

Just pop that cd into your server, or remotely mount it via NFS like I did, and run:

# smitty printers
Printer/Plotter Devices
Install Additional Printer/Plotter Software
choose /cdrom or whatever mount point you used
hit list to choose the printer drivers you want

The trick is finding them. Once you find them, it's super easy.