Problems with installing HP LaserJet M1005 usb printer on debian clients on a network
Dear All,
I am saddled with a job of installing a HP laserjet M1005
multifunction printer on a network of machines running debian wheezy.
This is a usb printer, NOT a network printer. Unfortunately, it also
requires a proprietary plugin from HP. I could get it running on the
machine to which it is connected via USB. My problem: I am not able to
get it to print from other machines on the network.
Details:
I will begin with describing how I got it working on the print server
(i.e. the machine to which the printer is connected on a usb port). I
installed hplip using aptitude and then used 'hp-setup -i'. It asked
about the mode of connection, on selecting 'usb', it found the
attached printer right away, downloaded the proprietary plugin from
the internet, asked if I accepted the license, installed the plugin on
selecting 'yes', and then generated a ppd file in a few more steps.
Done! The printer works as it is supposed to.
On any client machine on the network, the above procedure doesn't
work. If I select 'network' as the mode of connection, hp-setup cannot
find the printer. I am not able to find any way of telling hp-setup to
look for a printer connected through usb to another machine on the
network. Using "hp-setp -i ip_address_of_print_server" doesn't work
either.
So I took the cups printer set-up route. I gave the ip address and
path of the printer, copied the ppd file from the print server, and
set up the printer. When I tried printing a test page, it failed with
the error "/usr/lib/cups/filter/hpcups failed". So I used 'hp-plugin
-i' and it downloaded all possible proprietary plugins from the
internet and installed them. I restarted cups, even rebooted the
machine, but the error remains the same as given above.
I tried another trick. The default installation of cups has two more
ppd files, one for HP LaserJet 1005 and another one for HP LaserJet
M1005, and both these files do no seem to require proprietary plugins.
I tried to use these ppd files during installation through cups, both
with and without the proprietary plugin installed. Either way, the
print job simply says "The printer is busy", the error log file on
cups repeats it with no elaboration.
Next, I purged all of hplip and cups, simply installed
printer-driver-foo2zjs using aptitude, and tried to install the
printer through ppd plus proprietary plugin route. The error message
still remains "The printer is busy".
Next, I purged the printer-driver-foo2zjs package installed through
aptitude, downloaded foo2zjs package from the openprinting website,
and repeated the procedure. The error message - "The printer is busy".
My guess is that the problem is with the proprietary plugin files. I
suspect that the plugin looks for a printer connected on the usb port
of the (client) machine on which it is installed, not for usb
connection on the print server machine. I understand that this is the
expected behaviour for a non-network, usb printer, but is there any
way to circumvent this restriction? Say, is it possible for cups on
the client machine to use the plugin files on the print server? Would
that help? Or can one get the printer to work without the proprietary
plugin?
Curiously, I could set up the scanner part of this (multi-function)
device on all machines without any problem, using instructions given
at
http://wiki.debian.org/SaneOverNetwork
No idea if this can act as a clue of some sort.
Another point: Previously, all the machines at my workplace had
different versions of windows, before I convinced them to shift to
debian gnu/linux. The printer could be set up to be used through the
windows server as well as through all the windows clients.
As of now, I am clueless about the next step.
Any help appreciated.
Regards,
arvind
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