This printer needs a propitiatory plug-in for it to work. Which was great except for the fact that the printer did not print.It refused to print a test page no matter which driver I tried. Going to Menu/Administration/ Printing did show that Mint 10 had detected and installed the printer. The default installation did, in fact, install the printer. The only problem I had with this distro was installing my HP LaserJet P1006 printer. My congrats and thanks to all the hard work done by the Linux Mint team. The usability is still WAY better than Windows, though.First off,I must say that Mint 10 is is the best. I try to point them out when I notice them. There are a ton in Gnome, Debian, and Ubuntu. Yes, I was frustrated, especially by the silent failure with no error. I'll see if I can put together a patch even though I knew nothing about how HPLIP worked until last night. Since the bug still has not been given an importance, I doubt it's going to get any love by the developers soon. To set up this printer, you need to download firmware (sihpP1006.img).:hplip-setup does this when you run it manually, but HAL detects the printer and should download the firmware using "getweb p1006" and place it in the firmware directory, but it doesn't.
In fact, setting up my last printer (6 years ago?) on Red Hat was trivially easy. Printing using HP has been perfect ever since I started using Linux in 1997 or so. This was not a "printing on Linux is horribly broken" post: don't take it that way. Maybe I should start an UbuntuHater blog, eh?īack to reality. One more "user-friendliness" strike against Ubuntu, the distro for human beings (not geeks). The average user would never have gotten this far.
When you add the printer this way, HPLIP knows to download the appropriated plug-in and asks for you to agree to an EULA. It needs to be installed using sudo aptitude install hplip-gui and running sudo hp-setup. The printer is set up, but the appropriate plug-in isn't installed. I tried looking over the config and looking for other possible drivers, but there was really no other choice than what I had. I plugged in the HP Laserjet P1006 printer and it was immediately recognized and ready to print, except that it didn't actually print. I left the store happy, knowing that setup would be simple. I asked for an extra cartridge, knowing the one that came with the printer would be marginally filled. The laser printer should have been cheaper per page, so I asked her if she wanted copy and scanning. Both were relatively cheap (~130K won, or ~USD90).
We went down to the Hi-mart near us and looked at two models - a laser printer and a multi-function. She runs Ubuntu, which uses HPLIP, a great system that guarantees that virtually every HP printer works with CUPS, and it includes functions like scanning for multi-function printers, too.