On Thu, Oct 07, 2010, James Szinger wrote:
On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 8:19 AM, Boris Epstein borepstein@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 9:39 AM, James Szinger jszinger@gmail.com wrote:
Recently at work, I had to set up a new HP, and had a hard time finding a Linux PPD, and our sysadmin had no more success. I ended up grabbing the OSX PPD and removing the Mac specific parts.
What was the new HP you were having trouble setting up at work, if you happen to remember?
It's an HP LJ P4515, and it works well now that it is setup.
To find the Linux driver, I went from the printer's web page to the HP support site to the HPLIP site. The first time, my browser crashed. The second time, I didn't see anything obvious to download. Then I gave up and hacked the Mac PPD. Now, in hindsight, I see that hplip-3.10.6.tar.gz has a suitable PPD. I found the process much more difficult than it should be.
I have been very disappointed in HP's support for older hardware (for some loose definition of older).
After a hard drive crash required reinstalling the HP drivers for an old ScanJet, the drivers were no longer available from HP. I replaced that scanner with a new ScanJet 5590 early in 2009, but couldn't use it on my new Macbook Pro with Snow Leopard until the 2nd quarter of 2010 as HP didn't have drivers for it until then (their web site said they would be available in September when I first started looking in August).
That said, we generally use single-function HP network printers that support PCL5 and PostScript as these Just Work(tm) without anything fancy.
My main printer here is an HP 4M Plus with duplex that I bought new in November 1995. It just keeps on printing, although I did spend about $200 last year to have it serviced and new rollers installed.
Bill