[CentOS] Getting printer to work under 5.2

Thu Jul 17 03:04:22 UTC 2008
Donald Buchan <malak at pobox.com>

Hi

I have a standard hplip install on my 5.2 box installed from the repos
(it originally was installed from the 5.1 disks and followed any upgrade
that may have occured in the transition to 5.2).  My printer is a HP
Deskjet F4180 connecting via USB.

I can't get the printer to work.  Documents manually printed from the
file menu in OO.o 2.3 stagnate in a print queue, while the print icon
produces an unspecified error.

The cups daemon is running (it has been stopped and restarted a couple
of times, along with a reboot just to be sure even though I knew it
likely wouldn't affect things.)

The standard hplip was uninstalled, and mannually installed from the HP
website, with all dependencies resolved (rather frustrating to go
through five dependency installs one at a time since the manual install
of hplip only mentions them one at a time. :) )  This still didn't work.
The manual install was uninstalled and the standard install from the
repos was reinstalled.

The OS does seem to detect the printer, at least when it's on; I have
turned it on, unplugged it, and plugged it back in and on at least one
occasion it was automatically detected.

The printer does work; I used an Ubuntu 8.04 live cd and printed a test
page straight off the bat without any modifications.

Using a Dell P4 2.8 Optiplex (don't quite remember the exact model
number ... gotta reboot for that to see the initial screen. :) )

Any ideas?  (No, I won't install Hardy Heron, even if it is LTS. :) )