Printer missing from HP list

Axios

banger You might still keep eye on your post somebody may chime in
and know something else.

banger

Well on Zorin it has the foomatic driver for the printer. But googling it looks difficult to setup.

Sebastian

You might try the following:
in live environment, open firefox to access cups web interface.
put http://localhost:631 as url
Then click on maintenance, then on add printer.
You might be asked for username and password.

For this, open terminal and write whoami to see username of live session.
Then write passwd to set password.

I do not know whether you have to choose serial port or LPT1, but after you have entered name, description and location of printer, on next page you can select an ppd file as driver.

This file you have to download from here

Then you can see if you get your printer to print. Should be possible, though I am not an expert on that matter.
It's definetely difficult to do in a live environment, since you cannot really install software properly, and you can't reboot.

banger

Yeah Sebastion I thought of using the PPD file but it just said filter failed and the pnm2ppa program needs to be installed which looks complicated.

Sebastian

I am not at a Solus machine at the moment, but from studying the repository online I do have the impression that pnm2ppa is not in the solus repository(seems to be in Debian, Arch, Fedora..). Perhaps my fellow Solus users here in forum can verify in software center.
If it is not in repo, this might be because it seems to be last updated in 2009
Again, I am not an expert on printer setups and I cannot judge if there are other ways to set up your specific printer model.

SethStorm666

Nope, it's not in the repo (or I'm a poor searcher 😛 ).

How old is this printer? I couldn't find a date on it.

banger

It's pretty old at least 2008 because it has a parallel port connection. You can still get ink for it and Zorin has the drivers for it already built in. It's a shame because Solus is nice and snappy on the old 2008 machine.

brent

banger It's pretty old at least 2008 because it has a parallel port connection. You can still get ink for it and Zorin has the drivers for it already built in. It's a shame because Solus is nice and snappy on the old 2008 machine.

Copy the Zorin driver to Solus. The end. I've done that with a ppd before. unless its bundled? but it sounds doable.

edit/I thought 'a' was a better word than 'the' in this instance

SethStorm666

I can't even download the files to see if I can compile it on Solus :/

Sebastian

SethStorm666 I was able to download it, but compilation failed. It seems that building requires the application of a patch. Fedora, Debian, Arch do so, but I have no clue about those things.
Maybe someone here does.

@banger : a couple of days ago I also found some insightful info pages on openprinting how to set things up. Unfortunately I don't find them anymore.

I also read on a german site that if you have pnm2ppa set up, version in file /etc/pnm2ppa.conf should be set to version 710

And then, as a last "advice", I only have a really really bad one, and no Solus team member would ever approve it.
The Fedora package pnm2ppa lists as dependencies foomatic and glibc. And as file list:
/etc/pbm2ppa.conf
/etc/pnm2ppa.conf

/usr/bin/calibrate_ppa
/usr/bin/detect_ppa
/usr/bin/pbm2ppa
/usr/bin/pbmtpg
/usr/bin/pnm2ppa
/usr/bin/test_ppa

If I were really desperate to get this device working, I would try a really bad hack and copy those files from your zorin installation or the Fedora package to Solus and put them in the same place and keep my fingers crossed.
There are thousands of reasons why this won't work, and even if it does it is prone to break.
I personally would give it a shot. (and now I get banned from this forum 🙂 )

Sebastian

Staudey figured out that pnm2ppa is part of ghost-script-printer-app which is available as snap. But as plans are to deprecate snap in favor of flatpaks beginning of 2025, this is also rather a dead end.

Sebastian

brent The problem in this case doesn't seem to be the ppd itself, but that this ppd requires a special binary to work, pnm2ppa, whis is not available on Solus.

brent

Sebastian hahaha I kept track of this til I didn't. so you are saying the reason it works in Zorin is not because of the print driver but because of a binary call pnm2ppa? Zorin has it and Solus does not?
It ain't looking good. At HP they pulled all support for this model when I looked last night.

there's plenty about the ghostscript package at dev tracker. did we just deprecate it? Or does ours just not have the binary inside it?

banger

I cant even find the Snap Store on my updated Solus in a VM.

banger

Well I installed the ghostscript app in Snap from terminal and downloaded the PPD file on the live USB but still getting the error pnm2ppa is not installed - please install.

Staudey

banger Well I installed the ghostscript app in Snap from terminal and downloaded the PPD file on the live USB but still getting the error pnm2ppa is not installed - please install.

You're getting that error inside the Ghostscript Printer App?

Sebastian

banger Had you also installed foomatic. I read somewhere that the pnm2ppa package depends on it?

banger

So I installed Solus to a separate partition and everything was ok. Then I installed the 470 Nvidia driver and extras and it wont boot. Hard drive is active for a couple of minutes then just stops. I tried nomodeset in the command line but it didn't make any difference. Is there a safe mode? Help!

banger

So reinstalled and updated. Too scared to apply the nvidia driver.

SethStorm666

banger

Are you sure that your card is supported in driver 470?

The Open Nvidia driver is good enough as long you don't game. So if the open driver works there's no need for the restricted driver.

banger

SethStorm666 Are you sure that your card is supported in driver 470?

It is on Zorin anyway I now have a triple boot Solus, Zorin and Win10. I find Solus a bit restrictive in certain ways will need to play more.

banger

SethStorm666

I've had a couple of freezes with the Open Driver, usually on boot or restart. Once the desktop is loaded it seems ok. Had to put nomodeset in the grub command line. Seems to have stopped it. Just a heads up.

banger

Staudey

Afraid so.