Qz-tray and Debian
February 12, 2019QRG on install of Dymo LabelWriter 4XL, CUPS, and QZ-Tray on Debian Linux.
DYMO related installs
apt-get install printer-driver-dymo
CUPS related installs
apt-get install cups cups-bsd libnss3-tools
- libnss3-tools is neccessary for certutil, which qz-tray relies on.
- cups-bsd includes lpr, for command line printing. Don’t install lpr via apt directly as it is the non-bsd version that can’t see the same list as CUPS. i.e. ’lpstat -t’ may show your printer correctly, but lpr -P XYZ will say printer XYX is not found.
When cups is running you can view the web-interface at http://localhost:631/
You can also restart cups with: service cups restart
QZ-TRAY related installs
Download shell script from https://qz.io/download/
The script is actually a launcher for an embedded binary which gave an error on some pre-install conditions being unmet. It’s actually easier (I found) to run this script as “./qz-tray-x.x.x –confirm” and this will show where it unzips the embedded binary to (an /tmp/XYZ folder). Go to that folder and move it to your home directory and work from that so you can see any error messages properly.
In my case it was because I had not installed AdoptOpenJDK11: https://adoptopenjdk.net/installation.html#linux-pkg
Add to sources.list:
- deb https://adoptopenjdk.jfrog.io/adoptopenjdk/deb/ bullseye main
and run:
wget -qO - https://adoptopenjdk.jfrog.io/adoptopenjdk/api/gpg/key/public | sudo apt-key add -
apt-get install adoptopenjdk-11-hotspot openjdk-11-jdk
When trying to pair with Qz-tray via my shipping carrier website it was really handy to view the logs by clicking on the qz-tray icon and Advanced–>Diagnostic–>View Logs. This is what gave some error messages on missing lpr, certutil, etc. Check here if you have any issues.
DYMO Printer Label Sizes
When printing via QZ-tray I noticed the bottom of my label was getting cropped, this had to do with the XY co-ordinates in the associated PPD file. As root,
sudo nano /etc/cups/ppd/DYMO_LabelWriter_4XL.ppd
In my case it was on the 4x6 inch labels, I scrolled all the way down to *ImageableArea which defines the boundaires for each size of paper. I found the line items for my paper and changed it from 4.08 to 9.08 as below.
- ImageableArea w296h452/1744907 4 in x 6 in: “9.08 9.08 292.08 436.08”
Note the format of these numbers is: bottom-left x | bottom-left y | top-right x | top-right y.