At Work with Linux: Adding HP Officejet Support to Fedora 14

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Test printing using CUPS and the Gnome's system config printer

Test printing using HPLIP

LibreOffice Writer sees the newly-installed printer as well presented by CUPS and HPLIP

My Dell D630 may not be the most advanced notebook on the planet[1], but it's good enough for what I need. Tonight I decided to add support for my home printer, an HP Officejet Pro 8500A, for both CUPS as well as HPLIP. My printer is connected through one of the Dell's USB ports. There's not much to say except to follow directions for CUPS here and HIPLIP here. Because HPLIP uses CUPS install the CUPS driver for the HP 8500A then install HPLIP.

In all the years I've used Linux, I've never had trouble with adding printer support. I've had lots of trouble with other subsystems (graphics and audio are the two most troublesome areas), but printers have always worked for me.

Note: I didn't do anything magical, I just followed directions. Running HPLIP was wonderful to watch, since it fully automated everything, including a lot of command-line driver compilation.

Footnotes

[1] I got it three years ago. It's powered by a 2.4GHz dual-core Intel Core Duo T7700 with 4GiB DRAM and an nVidia Quadro 135M (equivalent to nVidia's 8400 GS consumer video card)

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