Dear All, I am saddled with a job of installing a HP laserjet M1005 multifunction printer on a network of machines running debian wheezy. This is a usb printer, NOT a network printer. Unfortunately, it also requires a proprietary plugin from HP. I could get it running on the machine to which it is connected via USB. My problem: I am not able to get it to print from other machines on the network.
Details: I will begin with describing how I got it working on the print server (i.e. the machine to which the printer is connected on a usb port). I installed hplip using aptitude and then used 'hp-setup -i'. It asked about the mode of connection, on selecting 'usb', it found the attached printer right away, downloaded the proprietary plugin from the internet, asked if I accepted the license, installed the plugin on selecting 'yes', and then generated a ppd file in a few more steps. Done! The printer works as it is supposed to. On any client machine on the network, the above procedure doesn't work. If I select 'network' as the mode of connection, hp-setup cannot find the printer. I am not able to find any way of telling hp-setup to look for a printer connected through usb to another machine on the network. Using "hp-setp -i ip_address_of_print_server" doesn't work either. So I took the cups printer set-up route. I gave the ip address and path of the printer, copied the ppd file from the print server, and set up the printer. When I tried printing a test page, it failed with the error "/usr/lib/cups/filter/hpcups failed". So I used 'hp-plugin -i' and it downloaded all possible proprietary plugins from the internet and installed them. I restarted cups, even rebooted the machine, but the error remains the same as given above. I tried another trick. The default installation of cups has two more ppd files, one for HP LaserJet 1005 and another one for HP LaserJet M1005, and both these files do no seem to require proprietary plugins. I tried to use these ppd files during installation through cups, both with and without the proprietary plugin installed. Either way, the print job simply says "The printer is busy", the error log file on cups repeats it with no elaboration. Next, I purged all of hplip and cups, simply installed printer-driver-foo2zjs using aptitude, and tried to install the printer through ppd plus proprietary plugin route. The error message still remains "The printer is busy". Next, I purged the printer-driver-foo2zjs package installed through aptitude, downloaded foo2zjs package from the openprinting website, and repeated the procedure. The error message - "The printer is busy". My guess is that the problem is with the proprietary plugin files. I suspect that the plugin looks for a printer connected on the usb port of the (client) machine on which it is installed, not for usb connection on the print server machine. I understand that this is the expected behaviour for a non-network, usb printer, but is there any way to circumvent this restriction? Say, is it possible for cups on the client machine to use the plugin files on the print server? Would that help? Or can one get the printer to work without the proprietary plugin? Curiously, I could set up the scanner part of this (multi-function) device on all machines without any problem, using instructions given at http://wiki.debian.org/SaneOverNetwork No idea if this can act as a clue of some sort. Another point: Previously, all the machines at my workplace had different versions of windows, before I convinced them to shift to debian gnu/linux. The printer could be set up to be used through the windows server as well as through all the windows clients. As of now, I am clueless about the next step. Any help appreciated. Regards, arvind -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/CAGCaVKsBTQQhCr8jy=qnxwy_hbv7c1jpzkgyrdxfosetjbe...@mail.gmail.com
