Linux & HP printers ugggg...

CrealCritter

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Wife says I need for you to please scan these 4 double side pages and email to one of my son's. Yeah sure OK.

Well I have Ubuntu Linux that I'm using as a TV box so we can watch TV after "cutting the cord" it's wireless mouse and keyboard and the screen is our TV. It's a pretty cool setup and free since I don't have to pay dish or for cable.

My wife has a HP printer/scanner/fax hanging off a piece of cra- windows computer that I absolutely can't stand using. I really can't wait to dump windows and install Linux on it. I found out the HP printer is wireless so I put it on the network :) but getting Ubuntu to talk to it over the network and use it as a scanner is another story :(

After several hours of reading man pages I was finally able to get it to print but could get it to scan. So after reading more man pages on the HP website. I found out I had to install HP Proprietary drivers :( so after another hour of finding and installing the HP drivers and upgrading back leveled dependencies. I was able to get it to scan and now have full control over the printer and all of its settings. If it could make me toast, I could have it do that for me from the comfort of my lazyboy -:lol

A simple ask from my wife, turned into hours of reading and being a script kiddie all over again. Absolutely crazy that HP would have proprietary drivers on a open operating system like Linux. What a pita :( I have a headache now, geeze thanks HP. I'm too old for this script kiddie stuff. But I was bound and determined to get this HP all in one working even if I had to write my own drivers to do it. Thankfully it didn't come down to that, but still!

Sometimes I think I'm to stubborn and should just say no. But I hate giving up on any challenge, even if it gives me a headache like this one did.
 

flowerbug

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i also run Linux (Debian testing/unstable because i like tinkering). Ubuntu is based upon Debian.

some things needed by newer hardware may be proprietary and need a special driver. that the manufacturer provides one at all is a good thing.

my current printer is some old HP deskjet. works fine for what i need it to do. when it breaks or runs out of ink i have two other printers that have been given to me to use up.

one of the jobs i used to do where i worked as a systems admin was setup all the interfaces between the database and the printers including designing a whole job control queue so that scripts/jobs could be run one after the other. it was a fun time when we moved from the mainframe to the mini-computer. i don't think they even have the same hardware any more at all because it was a pretty generic system based upon i385, i486 processors and a cabinet of disk drives - it ran a variety of Unix adapted to that hardware (not Linux).


oh, i see they were bought by IBM and then eventually folded.
 
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