You will want to select Generic as the make of printer. If you don’t have the option for “Serial Port #1”, then use the Device URI “ serial:/dev/ttyS0“. To install this plotter in CUPS, you’ll want to open up your Printer configuration area from the System menu.

This did not need to be a very secure environment (we didn’t even password protect the workstation’s desktop) so I figured this would be a reasonable approach, rather than troubleshooting why CUPS was getting permission denied errors while printing to the serial port. In order to ensure communication with non-root users, I took a questionable approach, and I decided to: chmod 777 /dev/ttyS0

I reset my plotter to the factory default settings, which resulted in a condition where I could assume this about my serial connection: In order to establish proper communications between the computer and the plotter, I had to ensure some things were true. The plotter interfaced with the computer using a serial connection. Here are some photos of the Gerber enVision plotter I was working with. If this is not the case, I imagine most of these instructions will apply fairly well to any kind of vinyl plotter. I am also assuming you have an older Gerber enVision series plotter. However, any Ubuntu or Debian flavor should be acceptable. On my test computer, I was working with a clean installation of Ubuntu 12.04 (12.04.1) LTS. This tutorial will assume that you have some prior experience with the Linux terminal and the Linux desktop. I am by no means an expert, but I found very limited web resources out there on this topic, and I am hopeful that someone will eventually stumble on this article and find it useful.Ī simple, free, and open source solution to an expensive and complex problem: How do we plot stuff with our vinyl plotter? This tutorial will attempt to comprehensively explain how I got this working. I decided to look into open source solutions, and I found out that Inkscape can do vinyl plotting with an extension called InkCut. I had major difficulties getting the old version of Omega working with their USB licensing stick, and I knew that getting anything like this working on Windows without proper licensing would be an inadvisable, and rocky road ahead. I recently had the opportunity to work with an older Gerber enVision plotter from a township.

Lynx plotter on inkscape linux mint