Printer problems..

Capt Lightning

Capt Lightning

Well-known Member
Location
Historic Buchan, Scotland
I am currently using a Dell Inspiron laptop with Ubuntu 20.04 and an HP printer (via USB). HP doesn't directly support Linux, but there is a utility called HPlip that I have been using successfully.
Then two days ago, it stopped working. It lost the printer and when I tried to reinstall it, it wouldn't work. I've tried reinstalling HPlip and anything else I could think of, but no luck. The printer works fine with by trusty old Dell Latitude (Ubuntu 18.04) and an earlier version of HPlip. Out of interest, I decided to see it it would work 'wireless', so I set the printer wireless 'ON' , entered the wireless 'key', hit 'print', and away it went. No fancy set-up or anything.

At least I've got a working system, but I'm no nearer to understanding what went wrong with the USB printing. (Print appears to work, but nothing is printed).
 

I'm not a linux guy but sometimes it is wise to uninstall the old software and then re-install it in a new path. Some software saves settings based on the path to itself.
 
Capt Lightning said:
At least I've got a working system, but I'm no nearer to understanding what went wrong with the USB printing. (Print appears to work, but nothing is printed).
Click to expand...

This sounds like some sort of "software" incompatibility....probably due to a recent update on your computer. I, too, have a HP printer, and I've had to reload/update it's software drivers a couple of times when W10 did a major update. You might go to the HP web site, enter your HP model, and see if there are any driver updates, etc., available to download.
 

Thanks for the replies. Ubuntu (as I understand it) only updates security issues automatically. Other updates have to be individually authorised by the system owner (using password). This helps to protect the system from unauthorised software. Searching the web, it seems that a lot of people have experienced similar problems. Anyway, having found that wireless works with minimum set-up, I'll use that instead of a wired connection.
 
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