2013/10/20

HP Printer Setup under Elementary OS

I bought an HP Photosmart 6520 printer as it is known to be well supported under Linux (http://www.matthartley.com/buying-a-printer-for-ubuntu/). Unfortunately the standard HPLip tool in the Elementary OS Software Center (actually the Ubuntu SC) has no support for this printer yet.
But you can directly download the latest hplip from http://sourceforge.net/projects/hplip/ and simply run it in a terminal.
sh ~/Downloads/hplip-3.13.10.run 
With Ubuntu 13.04 this works flawless, but under Elementary OS it complained about some missing dependencies. By executing the following steps I could get the latest hplip tool running:
  1. set a temporary root password as it insisted on not using the sudo command:
    sudo passwd 
    
  2. install required dependencies:
    sudo apt-get install gcc build-essential python-dev libcupsys2-dev libusb-1.0.0 libtool libcupsimage2-dev  libsane-dev libsnmp-dev 
    
Now the hplip script should work fine (I selected "Ubuntu" and "13.04"):
sh ~/Downloads/hplip-3.13.10.run 
You can install your HP printer with a USB connection:
hp-setup 
or add a networked printer with (modify the command with the ip-adres of your printer):
hp-setup 192.168.0.212 
My HP printer is now fully operational, including the integrated scanner.
Don't forget to remove the root password afterwards:
sudo passwd -l root 

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