maverick: HP Officejet 4215 no longer prints text

[Thomas Olsen]

On Wednesday 16 February 2011 23:57:31 D. R. Evans wrote:
> D. R. Evans said the following at 02/05/2011 10:55 AM :
> > I just bit the bullet and moved my wife's computer up from hardy all the
> > way up to maverick (since this is the first version of KDE4 that I've
> > found passably usable).
> > 
> > But her HP Officejet 4215 no longer works properly: graphics print fine,
> > but when printing text the print head moves, but no text is actually
> > printed. Does anyone know how I can get her printer working again?
> 
> I filed a report at https://answers.launchpad.net/hplip/+question/144235
> and was told to update hplip... but having asked twice how to do so, I have
> not received any responses. Can anyone here tell me how to get the more
> recent hplip package on to my wife's maverick system?
> 
> I'd really hate to have to go back to Windows on that machine, but I'm sure
> you can appreciate that not being able to print is not a viable position to
> be in.
> 
>   Doc

Sorry for the late reply.

I had to update hplip on a friends box last week which gave me quite some problems because
the installer for some reason doesn't install the driver!?
I'll try to write down the steps I used.

1) Download the driver from http://sourceforge.net/projects/hplip/files/hplip/3.10.9/hplip-3.10.9.run/download

2) Unpack the driver by running:

sh hplip-3.10.9.run

and select 'q' to quit at the first prompt.

3) Change directory to the unpacked directory:

cd hplip-3.10.9

4) Configure, build and install the driver:

make clean
./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-foomatic-rip-hplip-install --enable-foomatic-drv-install --disable-network-build
make
sudo make install

NOTE: During configure you will probably get a lot of warnings about missing dependencies.
You'll have to install these by hand (using apt-get, aptitude, kpackagekit or whatever your used to).
Most of these packages are development packages (with a '-dev' suffix) and the configure script
will try to tell you which package to install, but I had to search the the package database to
try and find the right packages. The reason for the --disable-network-build switch is because there
was a missing package that I couldn't find.
Feel free to ask if you get stuck.

-- 
Best regards / med venlig hilsen

Thomas Olsen

Dropbox and my thumb drive had an epic battle. Dropbox won. http://db.tt/T0p6d6L