I have an aging Dell 1700 (not 1700n) laser printer, that I make network accessible via an equally geriatric SMB7004 ABR router (it has a parallel port for the printer and exposes network printer service).
Owing to a recent desktop upgrade, I found myself trying to remember how to get it work with Ubuntu and CUPS. I distinctly remember downloading the Dell Windows drivers and extracting the PPD file out to give to CUPS, with successful results.
Not this time.
Using the Dell drivers (1700 PS3) resulted in the printer flashing error briefly, then resetting; useless. I tired some of the generic drivers that come with CUPS (e.g. PCL5). They worked for 8.5×11 sheets, but would also print envelope sizes (which are supposed to manually fed) on those same 8.5×11 sheets. Nearly any reasonable driver seems to work for 8.5×11, but would also assume that size for other page sizes.
Eventually, I found a discussion thread about the Dell 1700 laser printer on Linux. It turns out that the driver I wanted was the generic PCL 6/PCL XL Printer Foomatic/pxlmono, which comes with CUPS. Finally! The irony of spending hours debugging a computer problem so that I could avoid handwriting an address on an envelope was not lost on me. 
September 6, 2009 at 16:08
just what i needed, bless you, edd
November 17, 2009 at 17:48
Thanks for the heads up I too was forced to reset my printer which happens to be a Laser Jet 1700n. I appreciate you taking the time to post this up for us. It really saved me some time fooling with it myself.
April 29, 2010 at 16:32
Enjoy the idea. Perhaps laser printer information should guide someone out there.
February 12, 2011 at 15:16
Note that this post is from mid 2008 – I’d recommend using whatever’s at the top of the list for “PCL 6/PCL XL Printer”, as of this comment “CUPS+Gutenprint vX.X.X Simplified”. This should give better compatibility/performance than “foomatic/pxlmono”.
April 9, 2011 at 06:29
@cdr, thx this helped alot.
Ive been having trouble with printing pdf files for a while now.
It took 2-3 mins printing each page ^^
February 3, 2012 at 13:16
With my 1700n, and using Ubuntu 10.04LTS, I found that the standard, already loaded driver for the ‘HP Laser Jet 1320′ works.. it IS the 1320, not the 1320n or other 1320(x) models.. select the first driver, called ‘foomatic’ from that next menu, labelled:
“HP Laser Jet 1320 Foomatic/pxlmono [en]”
Super Spiffy… after trying almost every other DELL driver in the library and having my printer spit out 90 sheets of random characters to print a test page, having this work made my happy places happy once again