min00 Minolta 2400W Color Laser Printer Driver

This page describes min00, an unofficial Linux driver for the excellent and affordable Konica Minolta 2400W Color Laser printer (also see the Official and Windows-only 2400 Drivers). You might also consider the m2300w driver, which comes with many Linux distributions, and despite the name supports the 2400W fine.

Download

Download min00 version 1.21, the latest working version (2009-04; 600KiB gzipped tar file). This is Linux source code, and includes an installation mini-howto in the README file. Briefly:
```
wget http://orion.laylalawlor.com/software/min00/min00_v1.21.tgz
tar xzvf min00_v1.21.tgz
cd min00
sudo apt-get install gcc make
./configure
make clean all
sudo make install
```
The README has directions for hooking the printer to CUPS under both Ubunutu and normal distributions.
Download min00 version 1.0, first working version (2006/03; 600KiB gzipped tar file). This version would actually segfault for a very small number of weird input documents.
min00 version 0.9 was the first beta (2005/10). It freaked out for many postscript files.

Bugs

Printing long documents (10+ pages) has been reported to cause errors. I think I need to break long documents up inside the driver.
Printing full-page graphics at 2400x600 causes the printer to stop halfway down the page and blink its yellow error light. You've got to turn the printer off and on again to get it back. It seems OK at 1200x600, so that's the default.
If the printer runs out of toner or jams up, it will try to report this back to the PC. The Windows driver includes a utility to read this data, but the min00 driver isn't smart enough yet. You might want to keep a Windows machine handy to read this data, if it's not self-evident. (I haven't run out of toner, so I really don't know what will happen.)
The name "min00" contains two number zeros, and no letter 'O's. This is easy to mistype.

There may also be unknown bugs, possibly bad enough to destroy your printer and/or sanity. You've been warned...

About the 2400W

The 2400W is a nice printer. I'm really happy with it.

Full-page color at 1200x600 dpi, with fantastic photo quality.
Fast USB 2.0 interface, and quite good per-page speed.
Cheap and long-lasting toner cartridges.
Only about $300US after rebate (in late 2005).

The only downsides are:

No ethernet built-in (a $119 option).
No PostScript--a "winprinter" with a proprietary interface protocol that I had to reverse engineer. The 2430DL comes with Ethernet and speaks PostScript, which may be worth the extra money.

Driver Details

This driver is made from two open-source pieces:

The CUPS & foomatic framework, documentation, and build system mostly come from the m2300W driver, which is for the Minolta 2300W. I probably added a few bugs in hacking it to work with the 2400W.
All the source code is based on Manuel Schiller's min12xxw-0.0.8 driver, which is for the Minolta 1200, 1250, 1300, and 1350. I used this version because its internal structure was a lot easier for me to understand than the 2300W driver (though this probably says more about me than the 2300W driver!).

CUPS Integration

All communication with the Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS) is via Foomatic, a sort of meta-interface for printer drivers to use.

I'm actually somewhat terrified of Foomatic--I had to try several times to get it to do anything reasonable, and I'm pretty sure I screwed up some of its XML files. Advice from Foomatic wizards would be much appreciated.

Interface Protocol

See separate protocol page.

Support

This open-source driver is NOT PROVIDED OR SUPPORTED BY KONICA MINOLTA. You can't call their help line and ask them about min00! I'm happy to respond to email questions, suggestions, or (best of all) patches for min00! Of course, I'm a busy guy, and I really can't help you install or debug your Linux setup--google is your friend!

Orion Lawlor, olawlor@acm.org