Running Fedora 18 KDE Spin, I plugged the HP Photosmart D110 usb cable into the usb port and it immediately detected a printer. A window popped up , NEW PRINTER DETECTED, CONFIGURING NEW PRINTER, NO PRINTER DRIVER DETECTED. So I did some research and found the hplip drivers were what I needed to install this printer. I opened up Konsole yum install hplip, unplugged the usb cable, plugged it back in and the drivers were immediately found. Easy enough ! I did a print test, all worked great, I then decided to do a scan test, only to realize I had no scanning software installed. I installed xsane - yum install xsane. Found the program in program launcher under graphics, clicked it and no scanner found :( I read a little more, and it seemed I had all the right drivers and all the right software, so here's what I did to get the scanner working.
I'm not sure if the problem was because I installed xsane after the hplip drivers. So I left xsane alone, and removed hplip yum remove hplip. I then did a yum search hplip and installed yum install hplip.x86_64 and also installed yum install hplip-gui.x86_64. I went back to program launcher, graphics, xsane and the program loaded, detected the scanner with no problems this time , so I threw the printer test page in the scanner and everything worked great ! I then opened another document in libreoffice, hit print and the printer still worked fine.
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| Scan of the HP Photosmart D110 print test page. Scanner and printer run great. |
When I was playing around with this project in Fedora 17 with Gnome it was almost plug and play. I plugged the usb cable for the HP D110 Photosmart printer into the computer and it detected everything and Gnome already had all the scanning software and everything I needed installed. In KDE it was a little more involved but with a little research I had everything working in under an hour. With the Dell Inspiron 1501 I would still suggest running Fedora 18 KDE Spin. It was a little more involved configuring the printer but KDE seems to run a lot more smoothly than Gnome did in this machine.
On a final note, this computer will not be networked or used on the internet now that I have it configured and all the software I need installed on it. If you're running cups, and printing with your linux computer you may want to look into some of the security issues pertaining to cups. Everything I read about the subject said it is best to avoid this software on any networked or internet ready computer. I may be doing some future posts on cups, and making a more secure environment for printing using Linux. Till next time, thanks for reading !
