Upgrading HPLIP

Support & Help Requests
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#1

I just recieved a new HP laser printer, model M148fdw. I’m having some issues getting it to work with Ubuntu MATE specificially.

The issue is that the printer driver required by the printer is new enough that the version of hplip that ships with Ubuntu 18.04 is too old to contain a driver for it. It requires the newest and shiniest hplip.

That’s fine, but HP doesn’t provide any PPAs for upgrading hplib in an ubuntu-y way anymore. Instead they make you download some godforsaken binary runnable blob and execute it.

But before I can do that I need to uninstall hplip and its associated stuff. However, ubuntu-mate-desktop and ubuntu-mate-core depend on hplip, so if I uninstall hplip via apt it (at least without some sort of apt pinning faffage) it’ll uninstall those packages, and I can’t imagine that’d be good

I tried to somehow update the printer driver list via the installed version of hplip-gui but no luck there. When I run hp-setup it refuses to recognize the printer (see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/hplip/+bug/1697958). It’s not found in the models.dat file.

What’s a reasonable workaround?

#2

… aaaaand of course as soon as I post that, I find a reasonable workaround, for printing at least.

It seems that a driver does come with CUPS for the printer (“HP LaserJet Pro M148f-M149f”), and I can select that printer driver manually via the printer properties “Make and Model” dialogs.

A headscratching caveat: Print Test Page from printer properties doesn’t. No idea why not. But printing from apps works fine.

This of course doesn’t help me with scanning (it’s one of those AIO printers), so it would still be useful if I could find a way to upgrade hplip to get that working.

#3

You should follow my guide on AskUbuntu to install latest binary HPLIP.

#4

I saw that and thanks for that work! However, it doesn’t help here because a simple “apt purge hplip” alone (without all the other packages) will cause ubuntu-mate-desktop and ubuntu-mate-core to be uninstalled. and that would be pretty bad, I’m guessing. This is an Ubuntu MATE specific problem,stock Ubuntu obviously doesn’t have the issue.

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#5

@mcdonc

On Ubuntu MATE 18.04 LTS I do not see big problem with removing ubuntu-mate-core and ubuntu-mate-desktop as they are both meta-packages without really useful installed files:

$ dpkg -L ubuntu-mate-core
/.
/usr
/usr/share
/usr/share/doc
/usr/share/doc/ubuntu-mate-core
/usr/share/doc/ubuntu-mate-core/changelog.gz
/usr/share/doc/ubuntu-mate-core/copyright

$ dpkg -L  ubuntu-mate-desktop
/.
/usr
/usr/share
/usr/share/doc
/usr/share/doc/ubuntu-mate-desktop
/usr/share/doc/ubuntu-mate-desktop/copyright
/usr/share/doc/ubuntu-mate-desktop/changelog.gz

So this will not really harm the system.
Just checked this on clean 18.04.1 VM.

Also make sure that you have installed proprietary driver/plugin for your device (as it is needed) - follow How should I install HPLIP binary/proprietary plugin/driver for my HP printer or printer+scanner?

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#6

Wow, thanks, I should have thought to look at the filelists of those packages. Thanks for the help!

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