An Ubuntu Friendly Printer Recommendation.

[Florian Diesch]

Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> writes:

> 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.

I've installed HPLIP from the web page several times on SuSE and Ubuntu
in the last years and never had any problems. So I guess there must be
some Mint-specific problem. As I don't have Mint at hand I can't test
what's the problem.

>> 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.

If you just want to install you don't need to know what you can remove
after installing.


>>> 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.

According to <http://hplipopensource.com/node/281> Ubuntu, Fedora Core,
SuSE, and Red Hat are officially supported.

>> 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.

That's the installer. But you can get  a tarball, too.


>> "System Requirements" <http://hplipopensource.com/node/295> lists what
>> software is required.
>
> It doesn't tell you the list of packages needed, though.

Yes, on not supported distros you need to find them yourself.

>> 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.

I wouldn't expect it to be a serious problem for any Linux tech support,
even on a not supported distro. It may be too complex for end users with
not supported distros - but that's not different from other drivers.



   Florian
-- 
<http://www.florian-diesch.de/software/easygconf/>