Hplip is the software that drives most hp printers. Usually new printers are only supported in newer versions of the software. Canonical doesn't backport new versions packages to older Ubuntu versions, that means that newer drivers are not going to be available in the Software Center of older Ubuntu versions.
As an example yesterday I needed to hook a hp 1005p to a computer running 8.04. I was forced to install a newer hplip than the version available in the repositories. I installed it using the script from the hp page, but I'd like to know other alternatives.
Which is the best (technically, not the easiest) way to install it and why?.
You can use the official hp installer as I did. It will detect that I'm using Ubuntu, uninstall the older drivers, fetch all the dependencies (includind build-essentials), compile the new version, make a nice deb and install it.
Great features:
- It's clean, it uninstalls old versions and install as a deb.
- It's always the latest stable version, it quickly adds support to newer printers.
- It worked with all the Ubuntu versions that I throw at it. Likely it's also cross-distro.
Problems:
- Takes loads of time to install, it must compile the driver and fetch hundreds of megas of dependencies from the internet.
- It doesn't integrate into Ubuntu Update, so no automatically security updates.
- Does it really need to add an HP icon to the tray?.
It's a great piece of software, technically it's amazing, but the first two problems are a issue for me.
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