Recently, I had some hiccups installing our HP P2014n printer on Jaunty (Ubuntu 9.04) desktop. The installer  would do all the right things and then request a download from HP after which the installer would hang. Googling around, I came across the HP solution for it at http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/index.html . I needed to download HPLIP, install and then follow the wizard to get my stuff done.Doing the same thing on other Ubuntu desktops, I realized that HPLIP was part of the repository. I’m not sure which one, but  I had selected show All Available Applications in Applications > Add/Remove… It is called the HPLIP Toolbox.

So basically you have to select and install the package. Then run the app from System > Preferences > HPLIP Toolbox

You can add a Parallel, USB or Network printer from here. It is just a matter of following the wizard. The wizard can also be started from a terminal window. ( sudo hp-setup ) The HPLIP in the repository seems to default to a GUI based install. However when I downloaded HPLIP form http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/index.html it was text based install (I don’t know if this is still true). However it does seem to run in an interactive mode on a system without X . (sudo hp-setup -i)

Piece of cake -nice tool. Thanks HP!

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