Digital Mustache » Fedora http://www.digitalmustache.com One more robot learns to be something more than a machine... Sat, 05 Mar 2011 21:36:08 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Fedora Printing and HPLIP http://www.digitalmustache.com/2008/01/24/fedora-printing-and-hplip/ http://www.digitalmustache.com/2008/01/24/fedora-printing-and-hplip/#comments Thu, 24 Jan 2008 13:55:21 +0000 brian http://www.digitalmustache.com/2008/01/24/fedora-printing-and-hplip/ Last summer, I setup my HP DeskJet 930C printer to my linux server running Fedora 7. I used the included CUPS server to share the printer with the rest of my network, including a Windows XP box, and two Macs running Leopard. It was working great until a few months ago when printing just stopped working from all of the network hosts. From the Windows machine, the queue window now had “access denied, failed to connect” within the title bar. Who knows what caused all of this, maybe a scheduled yum update or radiation from a meteor shower. Not knowing why it suddenly broke, I started tweaking settings in CUPS and Samba, but nothing worked. I used yum to upgrade to Fedora 8, but CUPS alone still didn’t work.

I did some searching and found this guide which describes hplip, a tool developed by HP for linux and their printers. The tool seemed to be installed but gave me an error that the GUI was missing. I had to run the following as root to install the necessities:

yum install hplip-gui PyQt

Then, as root, I ran hp-setup. This will take you through setting up the printer. Mine was already listed, so I actually ran hp-toolbox and deleted the existing one. Then I ran hp-setup again and recreated it with the desired settings. After that the printer was accessible from the Macs!

To get it accessible in Windows, I just had to install Bonjour for Windows (from Apple). Then the Bonjour Printer Wizard found the printer. The first time through I tried the latest HP driver for Windows that I had installed, but that didn’t work. Doubtful that it would make a difference, I tried the Generic Postscript driver and it actually worked! So now my network printer is working again.

I have a feeling that Fedora 8 has better Bonjour support (if Fedora 7 had any), so that could also be part of the solution. Hopefully this experience helps someone else!

]]> http://www.digitalmustache.com/2008/01/24/fedora-printing-and-hplip/feed/ 1