HP on Ubuntu
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| bigg May 16, 2008 3:49 AM EDT |
Just so you know, there is a bug report for this specific printer problem: [url=https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/ source/foo2zjs/ bug/199864]https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/ source/foo2zjs/ bug/19986...[/url] For some reason it pretends to install but does not install certain firmware files. Someone suggested using the hp-setup application. If Ubuntu wants to be a newbie distro, it needs to handle stuff like this better, that's all there is to it. This would be a dealbreaker for most Windows users. I came across this because my own HP 1000 stopped printing a few days ago and I haven't figured out how to get it going. My office computer is moving to Slackware and my home computer is moving to Mandriva as soon as I get a chunk of free time... |
| wjl May 16, 2008 5:00 AM EDT |
There's clearly a problem within HP, still. They make a difference between "corporate" and "cheap stuff" users, as my brother found out one day. He had purchased a cheap HP printer, and didn't have any drivers for his Win2k. When phoning HP support about it, they told him something like "Ooops - we didn't expect any buyers of cheap hardware like that to use expensive OSses like Win2k" I think HP makes wonderful hardware, but you definitely have to buy the more expensive stuff... Engineers are surely more than worth their salt over there, but I'm not sure if you could say the same about some divisions and their management staff. But no pun intended. HP are great supporters of open source, after all. |
| bigg May 16, 2008 5:15 AM EDT |
Along those lines, it should be noted that the last I checked, there was still no Vista driver available for my wife's laptop, so the only way she can print is to boot into Linux. That's one of the reasons her laptop cannot remain Vista-only. |
| Steven_Rosenber May 16, 2008 1:32 PM EDT |
I bought the printer in question -- the HP Laserjet 1020 -- because it was the cheapest one available. I got it specifically for the Mac -- an iBook G4 running OS X 10.3. The printer wasn't listed as Mac compatible. Instead, they wanted Mac users to buy the more expensive HP LaserJet 1022. I just bought the cheap one and found out that the 1022 driver -- which I downloaded from HP -- worked anyway. I've never tried to use the printer with Windows. But I was plenty surprised when it wouldn't work with Linux -- Ubuntu 8.04, Debian Lenny AND Puppy 3.00 all failed to print to it. Like I say in the post, I don't know if it was the new driver itself that finally made it work, or the "hotplug" instruction: # make install install-hotplug cups .. but sheesh -- printing via USB should be a total no-brainer. In most CUPS implementations, just about all of my printers on the network show up automatically. There's one printer -- the one I usually want to use -- that doesn't, but it's easy to add it with CUPS. I figured that adding a USB printer would be super easy. CUPS finds it, no problem, but it just wouldn't print until I installed the new driver and the "install-hotplug" thing. And I wouldn't have even known about the driver and the whole procedure if one of my commenters hadn't pointed me to this Web site: http://foo2zjs.rkkda.com/ I can EASILY see a user of the new HP Mini-Note laptop running SUSE and not being able to print to their HP printer. ... That would look really good. The reason I got an HP printer in the first place was that I figured, "HP must work ... it's HP ...." |
| bigg May 17, 2008 4:49 PM EDT |
In the event that anyone else has the same problem in Ubuntu that Steven and I had, it takes just "sudo hp-setup". If only they would tell the user this. |
| Steven_Rosenber May 17, 2008 9:30 PM EDT |
Quoting:In the event that anyone else has the same problem in Ubuntu that Steven and I had, it takes just "sudo hp-setup". That's IT? You're KILLING me. ... I'll try it in Ubuntu and report back. |
| bigg May 18, 2008 5:05 AM EDT |
You have to click through a few setup windows. My printer was automatically detected, I didn't even have to change anything. |
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