The legend of Zorin
QMy problem concerns the use of my printer, the HP OfficeJet Pro 6970 on Ubuntu 16.04. The printer won’t work properly until I run sh hplip
3.17.11.run . This involves a dialog requiring the right answers from myself. When I get the answers right the printer works correctly using a USB cable. I’m unable to print by wireless even though the printer has that facility. I’ve found that HP printers in general work well with Linux. However, my main problem is that for no apparent reason the printer stops working and the hplip program has to be run all over again. Strangely enough, I ran Zorin from LXF226’s DVD, which identified the printer, found drivers and printed a file from
LibreOfficeWriter. All apparently without any involvement from hplib. Bryan, viaemail
APrinting in Linux has always confused me, but it seems like the situation is slowly improving. We used to get lots of complaints about the .DEBs provided by Epson, which insisted on depending on outdated (or non-existant) versions of lsb . But Hplip seems to be quite well supported, it’s actually already included in both Ubuntu 16.04 and Zorin, although that version is older than the one you mention. Rather than downloading and running the script each time, you may have some joy just running the GUI set up, which it runs after it asks you all those questions. Try running it with
hplip-gui , you may need to apt install it first, and possibly remove the downloaded Hplip and reinstall the one from the repos. To add to the confusion there’s also a new version (3.18.4) available from the HP website, which may do a better job of remembering your printer settings.
A lot of work went into improving printer support in the past couple of Ubuntu releases, and probably the answer is that some of this “driverless printing” magic made it into Zorin. Still, you may not be willing to upgrade your OS just to fix this. You’ll be automatically offered the upgrade to 18.04 when the first point release comes out, by which time there shouldn’t be any nasty surprises.