HPLIP won't work right

English Hardware
1

Hello again. I’ve made some pretty good progress … I now have six flavors of Linux running on my new PC (“Pop OS”, Ubuntu 18.04, KDE Neon, Debian 10.0, openSUSE Leap 15.1, and openSUSE Tumbleweed). I can get hplip to work OK on all of them except Tumbleweed. I can run “hp-setup” in a console window, and it says it has installed my print queue, etc. But I can’t find the print queue that hp-setup says it has created. And when I run “hp-toolbox” (the GUI version of hp-setup) I get stuck in an endless loop – the program finds my printer OK, and says I have to install the plugin, then downloads and installs the plugin. It even says “Plugin Installed Successfully”! But when I try to move on to the next screen, where I set up the print queue and the driver, I can’t – it says I first have to install the plugin that I just installed. So I’m stuck in an endless loop.

I filed a bug report with the hplip guys at SourceForge, and they made some unhelpful suggestions. So I’m asking about it here … does anybody have an idea how to get around this problem? From reading the old bug reports at SourceForge, it appears that this problem comes up with every new release of a Linux distro. At least, it happens a lot. Thanks!

2

Hi
Just check that the cups service is enabled and running… then run hp-plugin as your user to install


systemctl status cups
systemctl start cups
systemctl status cups
systemctl enable cups
3

Not seeing this with the stock hplip packages from the TW repos. How did you install hplip?

4

Well, I’ve done it a couple of ways. At the moment, I have installed it using YAST (hplip 3.19.6-1.1). When I try to run hp-setup from inside of YAST (part of install a printer dialog) hplip says ‘Please run “hp-plugin” as normal user to install plug-ins.’ And if I run it from the GUI interface in the “Start” menu I get the same message. I tried to run “hp-plugin” in a console window, and this is what happened.


david@install:~/Downloads> hp-plugin

HP Linux Imaging and Printing System (ver. 3.19.6)
Plugin Download and Install Utility ver. 2.1

Copyright (c) 2001-18 HP Development Company, LP
This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
This is free software, and you are welcome to distribute it
under certain conditions. See COPYING file for more details.


HP Linux Imaging and Printing System (ver. 3.19.6)
Plugin Download and Install Utility ver. 2.1

Copyright (c) 2001-18 HP Development Company, LP
This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
This is free software, and you are welcome to distribute it
under certain conditions. See COPYING file for more details.

Checking for network connection...
Downloading plug-in from: 
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/share/hplip/ui5/plugindialog.py", line 248, in NextButton_clicked
    status, download_plugin_file, error_str = self.pluginObj.download(self.plugin_path,self.plugin_download_callback)
  File "/usr/share/hplip/installer/pluginhandler.py", line 254, in download
    core = core_install.CoreInstall()
  File "/usr/share/hplip/installer/core_install.py", line 240, in __init__
    self.passwordObj = password.Password(ui_mode)
  File "/usr/share/hplip/base/password.py", line 113, in __init__
    self.__readAuthType()  # self.__authType
  File "/usr/share/hplip/base/password.py", line 135, in __readAuthType
    distro_name = get_distro_name().lower()
  File "/usr/share/hplip/base/password.py", line 86, in get_distro_name
    name = os.popen('lsb_release -i | cut -f 2')
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.7/os.py", line 989, in popen
    bufsize=buffering)
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.7/subprocess.py", line 775, in __init__
    restore_signals, start_new_session)
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.7/subprocess.py", line 1522, in _execute_child
    raise child_exception_type(errno_num, err_msg, err_filename)
PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/bin/sh'
KCrash: Application 'python3.7' crashing...
KCrash: Attempting to start /usr/lib64/libexec/drkonqi from kdeinit
sock_file=/run/user/1000/kdeinit5__0

[1]+  Stopped                 hp-plugin
david@install:~/Downloads> QSocketNotifier: Invalid socket 9 and type 'Read', disabling...
Unable to start Dr. Konqi
Re-raising signal for core dump handling.

which I guess means it didn’t work. If I try to run hp-setup from the console window I get the same error message about “run hp-pliugin as a normal user.”

So I’ve tried doing some other things … more on that later. Right now it’s late, and I’m tired.