Installing the Fuji Xerox 3125N printer

I've just bought myself a new printer, and as usual it had no OS/2 drivers. As a result, there was a certain amount of pain involved in getting it working. In the end, I got it working in two modes
 and of course the second of these is what I really wanted. The notes on this page are in part a review of the printer (which, overall, I quite like as a cheap but satisfactory laser printer), and in part a description of how the installation went, in the hope that I can help others who want to get this printer working.

Executive summary: it's working, and I'm happy with it. It wasn't easy to get it working, but it should be easy if you read these notes.

I bought the Fuji 3125N printer because (a) Officeworks was selling it at a good price; (b) It claims to have both PCL and Postscript 3 support, which means that it should be compatible with any operating system; and (c) It can optionally be set up as a network printer, which is attractive to anyone who has more than one computer.

Oh yes, and it's a laser printer. That's especially important given all the trips I've made over the years to Cartridge World to pay a fortune for InkJet printer ink cartridge refills. A laser toner cartridge costs over $100, it's true, but it lasts practically forever. (I've forgotten the numbers, but it's thousands of pages of typical text.) The cartridge that comes with this one is a cut-down version that has a much smaller life than the standard replacement cartridge, but all printer manufacturers do that, and the initial cartridge still has a reasonably good life.

It has three interfaces: parallel port, USB, and ethernet. That's a nice choice to have. I got all but USB working. I'll try to cover all three in the details below.

INITIAL IMPRESSIONS

It's not particularly pretty. White, rather than the more classy black that you get with suppliers like Brother. In fact, it looks a little flimsy, almost as if it was something made by Dell. In my attempts to configure it, though, I've had to carry it repeatedly between three rooms, and it hasn't minded being carted about. Its small footprint - spoilt only by the "tongue" that sticks out to hold the paper - is attractive to me, because it means that it fits easily on my desk beside the computer. Fancier printers need more space, but I guess that if you can afford a fancier printer then you probably have a bigger house.

The box gives an honest description of printer features. I have only two complaints about what it says:
  1. "Save paper with manual double-sided printing". Sure, but you can do that with any printer. "Manual" means that you print one side, and then feed the paper back manually to print the other side. True, this printer does have a place, above the sheet feeder, to feed a single sheet - this is a feature I haven't yet tested, and one for which OS/2 support is not necessarily present - but that's not vastly different from sticking the page back into the sheet feeder. If I were still making lots of transparencies I'd appreciate the single-sheet feeder, but that part of my professional life is over.
  2. The parts list. Most of what's on the box is in both English and Japanese, but the parts list is in Japanese only, which I can't read. I would have liked to know which cables weren't included.
The Japanese part probably also includes the "Made in China" label. I'm getting seriously sick of flimsy Chinese-made rubbish that keeps breaking down, but I guess we don't have a choice. The "level playing field" introduced by a former Australian government has driven most Australian manufacturers out of business, and I guess the same is true in most first-world countries. German manufacturers still make excellent-quality whitegoods, but I don't think the Germans are into printers.

UNPACKING AND INITIAL SETUP

The box contains the printer, an initial toner cartridge, and power cords for three different countries. (I guess I should mail the two unused cords to friends in England and in mainland Europe. It's rather unlikely that I'll ever transport this printer to another country.) There's also a plastic lid for the paper holder - presumably to keep dust off the paper - a USB lead, and two CDs. There's no parallel port printer cable, which is a pity. There's also no ethernet cable, but that didn't surprise me because ethernet cables are expensive. The CDs are for Windows XP and Windows Vista. (And nothing else, which won't surprise you. For other operating systems, the only useful things are a PPD file - of which there are 30 identical copies - and the manual.) When I later went to do a Windows installation, on my laptop with Windows 7, I really should have used the Vista CD, because the XP one had missing files; but Windows rejected the Vista CD with a message "Not compatible with this operating system".

The documentation is terrible. The instructions that come in the box have headings in English, with translations of the headings in numerous other languages, but the actual instructions are in the form of grossly ambiguous pictures. It took me several hours before I guessed that I might have inserted the toner cartridge back-to-front. It took me a whole day before I finally realised that one particularly obscure ideogram meant "shake the toner cartridge". I still need to remove it and shake it.

The documentation on the CD is a bit better, but it's badly formatted. It's not too hard to read on eCS with the Lucide document viewer. On Windows, which uses Adobe Acrobat as its PDF viewer, it's a royal pain in the bum; it's really difficult to find the page after the current page. In hindsight I realise that the PDF was designed to be read in its printed version. Of course, by the time you can print it you no longer need it, unless you already have another printer installed.

Loading paper is no problem. Inserting the toner cartridge is a matter of luck - if it doesn't seem to work, try it the other way around. I now realise that I would have done better if I had known how to interpret the printer lights and the single button, but that was buried deep inside the CD documentation and it took me a while to find it. For future explorers: a red light means that something is wrong, probably a badly inserted toner cartridge. Holding down the button for about two seconds gives you a test page. Holding it down for five seconds or more gives you a status report.

My initial attempts to get the printer working with eCS were a total failure. I therefore moved the printer to my Windows laptop and started with that. That took some time, as documented below.

The constraints of my house telephone connection means that I have computer devices in four different places. My main computer (eCS 2.0) is on the desk in the study, with a wireless LAN connection. My Windows 7 (hawk, spit!) laptop is on the kitchen table, again with a wireless interface. My modem/router is on the bedroom floor, next to my server computer (OS/2, version forgotten since it doesn't have a display or keyboard). My cheaper printer, a Brother multifunction that works only with Windows, is in the lounge room, and therefore useless except when I move the laptop next to it. The lounge room used to be the hub of the whole LAN, but I had to move to another phone point while my ISP was investigating ADSL dropouts. Now that I've moved everything into my bedroom the dropouts happen only two or three times a day, rather than several times per hour. I'm convinced that that's because there hasn't been much rain since I moved the router into the bedroom, but that's still a matter for further investigation.

(I'm at a disadvantage here. I get a good rate from my ISP because I'm on an Optus DSLAM. If I want to switch I'll probably get better performance, but at a cost of an extra $40/month, because Telstra charges like a wounded bull for access to their DSLAMs. For now I'm deferring the decision, because I'm looking for a new home. Once I move I'll probably opt for Naked ADSL with MyNetFone, a VoIP provider I've been very happy with.)

Unfortunately, that has meant that I had to keep moving the printer around the house while trying to get it working. Good exercise, I suppose, but annoying.

CREATING AND CONFIGURING AN OS/2 PRINTER

The instructions here are for eCS 2.0. I recall that in earlier versions of OS/2 you created a new printer object by dragging a printer template onto the desktop, and I can't recall whether that template was in the Templates folder or the System folder. That's a minor detail, though, and I imagine that anyone reading this can adjust to such differences. Things like port settings are still the same.

To begin with, you need to get a file called XP3125.ppd from the Windows XP installation CD. There are 30 separate copies of that file on the CD, but I think they're all identical. Furthermore, despite the name, there's nothing specific to XP in the file. I chose to copy the file to C:\ecs\install\PRNDRV\PPD\XP3125.ppd, to avoid having to find the CD later, but in fact there's nothing wrong with using it directly from the CD.

In the Printers folder inside "Local System" on your desktop, there's a shadow of the "Printer driver import utility".  Run this, select the option "Import Postscript Printer Description", hit the "Begin" button, and then specify the above-mentioned PPD file. What this does is create a new printer driver. It's actually a copy of the generic Postscript driver, plus some details about what features are supported by this model of printer.

Now run the "Install Printer" object, and choose "Standard printer". Select the "Install" button, and then "Install new printer driver". The list of printer drivers now includes a "Xerox Phaser 3125 PS", and that's the one you want. Once you have the right driver, edit the Name field to whatever you like, and choose an output port. For now, choose LPT1, which is correct for the parallel port connection. For other options, you'll come back later to change the output port.

Finally, the "Create" button creates your new printer object in the Printers folder. You'll probably want to right-click and choose the "Set Default" option, but if you prefer you can do that later.

OPERATION USING PARALLEL PRINTER PORT

Since there is no parallel port printer cable in the box, I didn't get to test this initially. My old printer (an HP DeskJet, now retired because of the cost of ink) does have a suitable cable, but it took me a couple of days to realise this, because you have to lift a lid to discover that the cable can be unplugged without the aid of sidecutters.

Once I had the right cable, this worked immediately with eCS. Text printing isn't as dark as I would have liked; that's probably because I didn't initially understand the instructions to shake the toner cartridge before inserting it.

Warning: before the first print operation, check the job properties. Mine had somehow been initialised to 2 pages/sheet, for printing A5 size on A4 paper. This saves paper (the text is shrunken), but isn't what I normally want. I had to save my preferred 1 page/page setting several times before the setting stayed saved. I haven't yet worked out whether this is a bug in Aaron's editor, or a printer driver problem.

INSTALLATION USING USB CONNECTOR

(Warning: this didn't work for me. I think there's a bug in USB printer support.)

The cable for this is included in the box, so it was the first thing I tried. To make this work in eCS, your CONFIG.SYS must include

BASEDEV=PRINT01.SYS
DEVICE=C:\OS2\BOOT\USBPRT.SYS
DEVICE=C:\ecs\boot\USBRESMG.SYS

(Some of these might be missing if you didn't specify a USB printer during installation. If they are, make the necessary CONFIG.SYS changes, and reboot.) In my case, however, this wasn't enough. I therefore carted the printer into the kitchen to connect to my Windoze (7) laptop.

As soon as I plugged the printer into the laptop the "Found new hardware" spook downloaded a driver. (1.8 MB! Whatever happened to the days when a device driver took up a couple of kilobyte?) Once the slow download was finished, the driver installation went very smoothly, and I had a working printer almost immediately.

Surprisingly, the driver was only a PCL driver. The big selling point of the 3125 is that it supports genuine Postscript 3, so why didn't it install a Postscript driver? At this stage, I started to wonder whether the reason why the eCS installation failed was that it wasn't a genuine Postscript printer.

For now, I still don't have it working under eCS, so let's move on to the next section.

INSTALLATION AS A NETWORK PRINTER

This appeared to require a Windows computer, because no other operating system was supported, and the manual didn't mention any other operating system. In hindsight I now know how to do it independently of Windows - and rather more easily - so don't follow this section step by step, or you'll end up doing it the hard way, as I did.

To have a network printer, you must first connect the printer to the router, using an ethernet cable. This part went smoothly, and the router immediately recognised the printer and, using DHCP, gave it an address. Then there are two further jobs:
 That first step took me several hours. According to the manual, all you have to do (on Windows) is to run Setup.exe, and then choose the option to install a network printer. This doesn't work, because the setup software can't find the printer. (I think this is because the Windows Setup makes brain-dead assumptions about the network gateway, but it took a lot of hindsight to discover that.) After several hours of experimentation, I found that the correct approach (for Windows) is the following. There's actually an easier way, which I would have found a couple of days earlier if I hadn't been sent down the wrong track by Setup.exe, and I'll describe that later; but I'll first describe the "obvious" way. If I had to suffer, so should you.
  1. Connect the printer to the router, and then hold down the printer button for more than five seconds. This gives a printout that includes IP address (incorrect and irrelevant) and MAC address (very important, so make a note of this twelve-digit hexadecimal number. Ignore the colons, because Windows won't accept them).
  2. Go to your OS/2 machine, run Firefox, and bring up the page for your router. (You presumably have this in your router documentation.) The details are different for different routers, but if you search long enough you will find the MAC address that you noted in step 1. Make a note of the IP address that has been assigned to this MAC address. In my case, it was 198.162.1.3. If you don't succeed in getting the information from the router, try the "ping" command, starting with the lowest address, until you find an address that responds and that doesn't already belong to something else on your LAN.
  3. Go back to your Windows machine, which is presumably still running Setup. Choose the option to change the printer's IP address. This utility starts, but will not find the printer. Choose the "manual configuration" option, and enter all the tedious details. The IP address and the MAC address are as noted in step 2. The mask should be 255.255.255.0 if you have a 192.168.*.* LAN, or 255.0.0.0 if you have a 10.*.*.* LAN. Check carefully for typos, because this is the point where Windows will still fail to find your printer.
  4. Assuming that the printer is at last found, change the IP address to something compatible with your LAN. I chose 192.168.1.250, on the grounds that it was within my 192.168.1.* subnet, that 250 was an easy number to remember, and that the address was outside the range that the router's DHCP server uses to allocate dynamic addresses. (My Billion router doesn't have an explicit provision for static IP addresses, so the way to get them is to choose an address outside the "dynamic" range. Some other routers, more sensibly, let you specify which addresses should be reserved as static. The important thing here is that you need to give the printer a static address.) Obviously I would have had to choose something different if that address was already in use.
My router, mysteriously, did not see anything at address 192.168.1.250. Possibly that was because its DHCP server only allocates addresses in the range 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.1.20. In any case, it didn't matter. Pointing Firefox to http://192.168.1.250, I got a printer status page.

OK, we're now back in Windows. Run Setup.exe again, and this time choose the "Install software" option. Then choose the option to install a network printer. This time, at last, the installer will find the printer, and all will go smoothly.

Well, relatively smoothly. In my case (Windows 7) it failed to find two files it needed. These were files that existed in earlier versions of Windows but that became obsolete. I found the first of the files by a Google search. The second one turned up in my "Windows.old" directory, where I had backed up Windows Vista. (Long may it rot in Hell.) If you're prepared to search the web, you'll eventually find those files. Actually, I suspect that a web search will also turn up a device driver that works with Windows 7, but I haven't yet done that. (Is Windows the only operating system where device drivers for one release are incompatible with the next OS version? That's like saying that a word processor should default to producing documents that earlier versions can't read.)

At the end of all this, I was able to print a test page from my Windows laptop.

That was the hard way, which I discovered because I had a computer that ran Windows. Now I'll describe the easy way, which I would have found much earlier if I hadn't been sidetracked by the Windows software. Perhaps Fuji Xerox could do its users a favour by selling the printer without any installation CDs. (Well, I guess it would still need to distribute the PPD file.) That way, assuming that they directed everyone to the printer's web interface - which I don't recall seeing mentioned in the documentation, although it was probably mentioned there somewhere - we'd all get the printer working a lot faster.

You still have to start by discovering the printer's IP address. As initially configured, the address is allocated by DHCP, which means that you don't know what it is without searching. Not a good decision in the long run - who wants a printer whose address is unpredictable? - but I guess it was necessary given that the vendors don't know in advance what your LAN addresses are. To find the address, you have to look at your router's web interface, and/or use tools like "ping", to discover an address that wasn't there before.

In my case, I knew that my LAN addresses had to be in the range 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.1.254. My router uses the last of those addresses. I have a wireless access point - a gadget that gives my main computer a wireless connection via an ethernet port - at 192.168.1.220. My server lives at 192.168.1.4, and my main computer is currently at 192.168.1.2. (I wasn't sure about that, but the "hostid" command told me the answer; and the "netstat -r" made it obvious where the router lived.) It was less obvious what address my laptop occupied - getting that sort of information from Windows is like pulling hen's teeth - but that could be resolved by shutting it down. That left a device at 192.168.1.3 that was responding to "ping" commands. By a process of elimination, that had to be the printer.

Does that sound messy? It isn't, really. Most people have a LAN with about two devices on it, so it doesn't take long to eliminate candidates. People with more complicated LANs tend to be more familiar with what addresses are in use. DHCP servers have a preference to start with low addresses, skipping only those addresses they think already belong to somebody. Thus, it doesn't take long to find the printer. If your router is helpful enough to list MAC addresses, it's even easier, because you already know the MAC address of the printer. In case you've forgotten: hold down the printer button for at least 5 seconds, and then let it go, and you'll get a status printout that lists (among other things) the MAC address. You just have to remember that the IP address on that printout is meaningless, and not the address you're looking for.

Here's another search method, if you want one. In your web browser, look at http://192.168.1.1. (Or whatever is the lowest possible address in your LAN.) Then try http://192.168.1.2, and so on. It shouldn't take long before you find something that is obviously the status page for a printer.

Once you've found the right address, go to that address in Firefox. You'll want to change that dynamically allocated address to a static address. Click on the "Properties" tab, and then on the "+" in the left area next to "Protocol", and then on "TCP/IP".

Next, change the BOOTP/DHCP option (which is probably initially set to DHCP) to "Static". Now go down to the next section, labelled "TCP/IP Settings". Change the IP address to the one you'd really like for the printer. (I chose 192.168.1.250 - a high address in my LAN, on the grounds that the low addresses are the ones preferred for dynamic rather than static allocation.) The net mask can probably remain unchanged, but in any case it must be set to something that's appropriate for your LAN address range. The Router/gateway address MUST be set equal to the IP address of your router.

That last point is where I made a serious mistake. That address had defaulted to 192.168.1.1, which is a commonly used router address. (In fact it's the address my previous router used, before it was damaged by lightning.) What I had forgotten is that my current router doesn't have that address. (If I had thought to run the "netstat -r" in a command window, it would have made that fact obvious.) The error in my router address meant that I lost a lot of time wondering why the printer wasn't working.

Once you've set those addresses - you shouldn't need to change anything else - go to the bottom of that web page and select "Save Changes".

At this point, your web browser will lose contact with the printer, because its IP address has changed. But of course you know what it has changed to (you did remember to write it down, didn't you?), so you can quickly point your browser to the new address, and verify that it's there.

OK, you now have the printer at a static IP address. Now it's time to change the "port" setting on your printer object, to turn it into a network printer object.

There are several ways to do this, depending on what you want to do about spooling, etc. I haven't tried all of them, because most options get you into really confusing configuration decisions. Having taken advice from some helpful people, I chose the simplest method. For this printer, the simplest option is IPSpool. IPSpool sends your printer data to port 9100 at the printer's IP address, and luckily this printer knows how to deal with port 9100.

IPSpool is not included in eCS, so you'll have to download it from somewhere. Go to http://hobbes.nmsu.edu, and search for ipspool. (If you're in Australia, and you don't mind a slightly earlier version, go to http://www.os2site.com/sw/util/printer/index.html). Unzip it, and run install.cmd. Allow the installer to put it into the Startup folder. Next, run "ipspool /i". Give the port a suitable name (I chose "xerox") and a human-readable description. Specify the printer's IP address, and select port 9100. Click on "Change/Add", and you've finished configuring IPSpool.

Next, go to your already existing printer object for this printer, right-click, and select Properties. Go to the "Output Port" tab. Here, you should see a port called \PIPE\nnn, where nnn is the name you chose when configuring IPSpool. (Don't select \PIPE\LPD0 or \PIPE\LPD1, which are for an option we're not going to use.) Close the Properties notebook, and your printer is ready to use.

And if it doesn't work? Well, at least you'll have some understanding for all the false trails I went down before finally getting it right. The big problem for me was getting the default gateway (the router address) wrong in the printer's tcp/ip properties, because then printing failed with no obvious reason why. If it fails for you, you'll need to backtrack through the instructions to find the point you missed seeing.

After all that, is Windows printing still working? Who knows? Who cares? I didn't bother to check.

Author: Peter Moylan
Last modified: 3 July 2010