Where to install HP printer driver? Into Fossapup64 CE or CUPS?[SOLVED]

[Sky Aisling]

Hello Puppers...
Yet another printer driver question.

The environment
The machine is: Asus laptop A53Z with AMD A6-3420M APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics.
The printer is: HP Officejet 4655 (all in one printer) using hpcups 3.18.6 driver.
The CUPS version is: CUPS 2.3.1.
The Distro is: fossapup64 9.6 (x86_64) mounted frugally on a flash drive.

The Goal
Currently, the printer's driver on the Asus laptop is 'hplip-3.18.6-bionicpup64' and is not correctly activating the printer.* See Note below.
The goal is to replace driver 'hplip-3.18.6-bionicpup64' with driver 'hplip-3.25.2.' to see if that solves the issue.

The Hewlet Packard website for HP drivers pointed to sourceforge.net for a download of a Linux 64bit Debian driver for HP Officejet 4655.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/hplip/
The download from sourceforge.net extracted into /root/Downloads.

I moved 'hplip-3.25.2' and 'hplip-3.25.2 run' away from Downloads to an external storage drive.
An error message appears when the script 'hplip-3.25.2 run' is activated. The message is "HPLIP-Install should not be placed as root". I chose not to continue.
How do I get the new driver into Fossapup64 system? And, where in the Fossapup64 system will the driver be placed?

OR ...

Perhaps I should be dealing directly with the CUPS 2.3.1 app and not Fossapup64?
https://developers.hp.com/hp-linux-imag ... tall/index
These install instructions are for 'sudo' commands not Puppy bash commands.

*Note: The interesting part is that the same printer running on another laptop (Dell) that is running Fossapup64 with a different CPU (Intel) runs without issues using the same driver,'hplip-3.18.6-bionicpup64' . A further curious part is that if the Frugal flash drives of Fossapup64 are switched between the machines, the Dell and the Asus, the Asus Laptop still has the same issue.
Perhaps the ADM processor is a concern? I've heard Puppy and ADM sometimes have issues.

Thank you in advance for your comments,

Sky

hplip-3.25.2.run3.png (162.34 KiB) Viewed 130 times

hplip-3.25.2.run5.png (60.49 KiB) Viewed 130 times

[mikewalsh]

@Sky Aisling :-

I suspect there's a certain amount of "misunderstanding" at play here.

What you refer to as the CUPS "app" is NOT a separate application at all. What you're seeing with the CUPS "app" @ URL ( http://localhost:631 ) in the browser is simply a graphical representation of the CUPS installation on your system.

Puppy has always used this. Many mainstream distros have often gone out of their way to write dedicated desktop 'Printer' GUIs. Sure, they look very impressive, and perhaps present the information & text-entry/option selection fields in a more appealing or 'user-friendly' way.......but the 'back-end' they're interacting with is the exact same stuff that the browser webpage is dealing with.

Dedicated GUIs have to be coded/maintained by their respective dev teams. The CUPS browser web-page comes as a standard part of every CUPS installation. Why re-invent the wheel if it exists and functions well already? Puppy does HAVE a printer GUI 'app', but all this does is to open the CUPS admin page in your default browser. Which is the same thing as what I've just described above.

You still need to have your drivers installed & functioning correctly BEFORE you can make use of the CUPS browser admin webpage.

=============================

So; to summarize:-

First, install your driver packages into Puppy itself. Second, you can then open your browser & use the CUPS browser admin webpage to set your printer up and get it actually working. Okay?

Mike.

[geo_c]

I moved 'hplip-3.25.2' and 'hplip-3.25.2 run' away from Downloads to an external storage drive.
An error message appears when the script 'hplip-3.25.2 run' is activated. The message is "HPLIP-Install should not be placed as root". I chose not to continue.
How do I get the new driver into Fossapup64 system? And, where in the Fossapup64 system will the driver be placed?

I'm not totally clear on what the order of steps taken so far is, but hplip should be available in the F96 package manager.

I use only HP printers because of the ease of using hplip.

If you want to keep your current setup but experiment a bit, try booting without the latest savefile/folder loaded, and install hplip from the package manager, then turn off the firewall and launch the CUPS page @mikewalsh was talking about, and choose add printer from the administration menu. With the firewall off the printer should show up if it's attached to the network, and then you can choose the driver from the list of drivers.

This has always worked with HP printers for me in F96 and bookworm, also Kennel Linuxes.

edit: once the printer is working turn the firewall on again.

[Sky Aisling]

@geo_c @mikewalsh

Thank you, geo_c and Mike,

You gave me the answer to my query.
Printers are such a pain to sort out.

Sky