That was a hoot. I recieved a free printer from my best friend's parents while I was in Texas, and hadn't gotten a chance to set it up till now. What I didn't know was Ubuntu's "Keep it simple" mindset was just a little too simple. More details to follow.
The printer is an HP LaserJet 4 Plus, yes one of those huge 90 pound office machines that will crush your toe or finger if you ever venture too close or stumble a bit when moving it. No, I haven't weighed it. I like to keep my fingers intact and attached. The Operating System: Ubuntu 9.04. I plan to upgrade to 10.04 when it's released, but this is my desktop, and it has to work in the meantime. I needed to stick this printer somewhere where it couldn't fall, and was easily reachable by me at my desk.
I selected the left cubby, which it fit perfectly in with just the right amount of breathing room, while my computer is on the right side of my desk, on the outside, because while it would fit just as nicely in the computer cubby, I wanted a bit more airflow around the case, without having to tear out the cardboard backing... but we're talking about the printer here! Point being, the 6 foot cable that came with the printer wasn't long enough. So, I bought a 10 foot printer cable for $7 plus shipping, which I got today; and found out that the printer-side connector was the wrong type. Phooey! I mentioned it to Dad and he said "I might have one of those cables." So I looked in the box of cables and junk he had in his office and found a 3 foot cable that would serve well to extend the cable I had. $12 wasted. (Return, maybe?)
I'd installed both printers that Dad has shared in the basement from his Windows machine fine, so I figured I'd have the same luck with the directly connected HP LJ4+, but alas, it was not to be. The printer showed up in the New Printer window, replacing the LPT1 option with "HP LaserJet 4 Plus" and in the description showing "HPLIP software", straight from HP's open source labs. "Wonderful!" I thought to myself. "HP sure is great. I knew they liked Linux!"
Unfortunately, once I went through the install (fairly simple, it seemed) and tried to print a test page, nothing happened. I check the printer, and it was displaying a "W2 Invalid Pers" error. Ah, the days when printers actually told us what was wrong themselves! Anywho. I had no idea what that meant, so after some googling I discovered that I'd need to install a PostScript module and some extra ram into the printer to make it work. Oh, the days when printers needed font modules and more memory...
I checked on the price of those after some more searching and found Amazon selling them for $75, and another place for $80. "Holy moly!" I thought, "$80 for a simple little font module? They sure don't make them like they used to, and I bet they were much more expensive then." I really, really didn't want to have to spend 80 dollars just to use a free printer that seemed to have drivers already installed. So I looked through Synaptic for anything mentioning "hplip" and found a few things I thought might be useful: hplip-gui, hplip-cups, and hpijs-ppds. The first, because sometimes gui's are a bit more helpful than the command line, and it'd been mentioned in the forums I looked at. The second, because why would the hplips backend for cups not be installed? probably a good idea to have it in case. And the third, because if I needed to use a printer definition file, that would probably be the package I needed.
After I installed those I checked the GUI and got the same error that other folks had run into: No discovered devices. I thought, "Bollocks! You just showed me it in the System printer window!" So I went back a screen and it mentioned going to the CUPS management page on port 631. I know a bit about CUPS, but I've never actually installed a printer through the web-ui. I did recall that moments before, I'd installed the hplip backend for CUPS, and that some people had gotten their LJ4's working by selecting a generic printer driver, so I gave it a shot.
Turns out, that was just the thing it needed. For some reason, the default HPLIPS driver sends PostScript data to the printer, which of course it doesn't understand without the (freaking $80) module. So I selected the Gutenprint driver, selected the default options there, and voilà! The printer showed up in my printer configuration window and I can print a test page! So now my shiny happy (old and dusty) printer works; and for (nearly) free, I can print in my room, and I'm happy that I learned a bit more about CUPS.
And now, time to delve into another project. Learning about subnetting and VLSM... Oh how my head spins with numbers.
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