An Ubuntu Friendly Printer Recommendation.

[Liam Proven]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 2:57 PM, Florian Diesch <diesch at spamfence.net> wrote:
> Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 1:14 PM, David Sanders <dsuzukisanders at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> The vast majority of HP printers have really excellent driver support,
>>> as well as being very well engineered.
>>>
>>> http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/index.html
>>
>> Um. I feel that this misses a number of rather important points.
>>
>> I have had to install HPLIP recently. It is /not/ easy - indeed, it
>> completely baffled 3 or 4 of the Linux techs in my company. OK, all
>> but 1 are rookies and the remaining guy is not a godlike genius just
>> yet, but he's learning blisteringly fast - but it defeated all of
>> them. It has multiple dependencies and on Ubuntu - only the world's
>> leading distro, you know, so nothing major or important - it is not
>> capable of resolving its own dependencies.
>
> Installing the current version (3.10.2) on Ubuntu 9.10 works without any
> problems, the Automatic Installer detects the distribution and installs
> all needed packages automatically. You just need to follow the detailed
> instructions on the HPLIP web page.

At the time when I first tried to do it, 9.04 /was/ the current
version. Mint 7 is just Ubuntu 9.04 with some tweaks - nothing
significant has been taken away, but some stuff is added.

> You need the development tools to compile a new version of HPLIP. After
> installing you can remove the development tools.

And how, pray, does one tell which are the safe bits to remove and
which are needed?

I did not intend to build anything from source; all I did was download
the latest HPLIP from HP's website & attempt to install it. How HP
chooses to implement this is their concern, not mine.

>> I documented the process here, FWIW:
>> http://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/18419.html
>
> There you write you did it on Mint 7. I guess Mint is not supported by
> the installer so the automatic installation fails.

Concur, but it does know about Mint - the LTS edition of Mint
(equivalent to Ubuntu 8.04) is suppported. Therefore the developers
know that they can use apt-get just like on Ubuntu.

> Manual installation needs a bit more knowledge as you need to find out
> which of your distribution's packages are needed to fulfil the
> software requirements. After that it's just the usual
> "./configure; make; make install" that is used by many other Linux
> software, too.

Not so. I just downloaded the file and ran it, as per HP's instructions.


> "System Requirements" <http://hplipopensource.com/node/295> lists what
> software is required.

It doesn't tell you the list of packages needed, though.

> It's installed by default in most distributions.

As I have already pointed out, not the current version.

> Installing it from
> source isn't more difficult than with most other software - with the
> Automatic Installer it's much easier on supported distributions.

Hey, I got it working, I'm not complaining - but it was not a simple
process. It was too complex for several Linux tech support staff, let
alone end-users.

Merely having HPLIP installed is not enough - it has to be the correct
/version/ of HPLIP.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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