Situation:I need some help getting my new printer to work in Uberstudent.
Background:Jump straight to the next reply where I will outline the "Problems" if you want to avoid wasting your time with my verbosity...
I decided to move over to free software for good, and my old printer multi-function centre is ready for the recycling centre anyway, so I bought a new one.
The old one: Brother MFC 5220CN does not like Linux, I found only one report on the net about an unsuccessful installation attempt. It does not print properly any more, I had to flash some code years ago to convince it that the spent ink deposit from cleaning is not over-full (but it is...) and I have refilled the cartridges probably 2 dozen times or so.
I did a little reading around and found out that different manufacturers have very different philsophies with regard to supporting free software. Hewlett Packard (HP) are putting in an effort to support free software, so I decided to buy from them.
However, a trip to the ink shop and a brief chat with the staff member there revealed that "Free Software" is coupled with "Captive Hardware" for want of a better word. HP have (for now) succeeded in their attempts to make it impossible to use generic ink cartridges in their printers, or to refill the cartridges with bulk ink.
The ink shop staff recommended Brother printers if ease of refilling cartridges is important to me, but Brother products are apparently difficult to get going in Linux systems.
I decided to put up with becoming a captive to original ink cartridges and took my now quite functional Uberstudent laptop into a shop to check out all HP printers on the shelves, using this web page:
http://www.hplipopensource.com/hplip-we ... bined.htmlThe page lists the HPLIP software support for HP products. I was looking for something that allows scanning to PC and PC initiated faxing. I don't need those functions often, but it always seems to be something time critical when I do need them once a year or so.
Other criteria important to me were that no driver plug-in should be required and that the ink cartridges need to be separate black/cyan/magenta/yellow, to bring down costs.
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HPLIP index.png [ 14.57 KiB | Viewed 14818 times ]
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Officejet Pro HPLIP list.png [ 5.96 KiB | Viewed 14818 times ]
I ended up buying the HP Officejet Pro 8610 because it ticks all those boxes, and is the cheapest in ink per page terms. According to the HP numbers on the back of their ink boxes and some calculations, it costs around 2.7 cent per page for ink. Ink for most other HP printers is much more expensive per page.
The first stages of printer setup went really well and I thought that's too easy.
The printer calibrated itself and printed a nice test page, and connecting it to my wireless network was super easy except for typing in a long hexadecimal password on the small touchscreen. It connected right away and appeared in Uberstudent>Applications>System>Hardware>Printers>Add>Network Printer>HP Officejet Pro 8610.
Now to the problems:I think the problems are related to the very newness of the printer. The HPLIP included in Ubuntu and Uberstudent is a bit too old to cover this printer. I need version 3.14.6, and the one in Uberstudent is 3.14.3 .
I found this by following instructions from here:
http://hplipopensource.com/node/306 and using this command:
Code:
dpkg -l hplip
I'll better start a new reply with the problem list before this gets much longer.