I have serious concerns about my HP D2560 printer after trying to use it under opensuse 11.1. This printer was already working under windows XP on the same machine.
I have no Linux experience, so I just tried to install it using yast. First I plugged the printer and turned it on (bad idea?). It made some crazy random moves I never saw under windows during a few seconds.
Then I opened yast, and chose “add a printer”, the printer was recognized and a driver found and installed. But It wouldn’t print. Actually, Linux nearly crashed, my screen just displayed some random colors and I managed to shut the PC down by logging as root and typing init 0 in a console (the thing you open with ctrl+alt+F<number>) ,without seeing anything on the screen).
I booted windows and tried to print a file, but the printer just went crazy, it kept moving the sheet of paper and the print head back and forth at full speed.
Now, the printer just acts randomly whenever I turn it on (even if it is not plugged into a computer).
Could the printer have been damaged by Linux? I’d be quite surprised if it’s the case, I never thought your PC could kill your printer. Is there a way to fix that issue?
I had a similar experience with an Epson CX5500 and openSUSE 11.0 while experimenting with drivers for similar models (none existed for my particular model). No permanent damage was donw, but I managed to cause the black ink cartridge to expire within few minutes trying to print test pages. I know for fact there was ink still in it (not much ink printed), but it still reported being empty. The printer would lock up as well IIRC, necessitating a power cycle. I eventually found a driver that worked (Epson Stylus CX3800 - CUPS+Gutenprint v5.0.2) and haven’t had a problem since.
I’ve heard good things about HP’s linux support. It might well be worth sending them an email - I can’t seriously imagine that what you’ve done could invalidate a warranty, and they might be able to help, as there are often tricks to reset things to factory states.
I had something similar happen to an HP5652 printer that I have.
But I do not know what operating system was in use/responsible when the printer broke. I almost always have a Linux PC as a print server, although when the printer broke, it may have been a print job from a Windows PC (or maybe a Linux PC - I can’t be certain).
Anyway, I was all “hot to trot” to buy a new printer, but my wife nix’d that idea before she conducted a thorough investigation. By thorough, it meant she spread newspaper all over the floor, sat down on the floor with the printer, and to my amazement she started to take the printer apart !!
She quickly discovered a thin plastic control rod that was broken. After some brainstorming between the two of us, I managed to find some thin plastic that we could use as a splint, and my wife scotch taped the splint along side the broken control rod, holding it together.
She then managed to put the printer back together (again to my amazment), although not with out some difficulty, … and believe or not, the printer functioned! That was a year or so ago … it still functions !
Now the splint won’t last forever and so my wife and I have an agreement that as soon as we use up the last spare printer cartridge, we will purchase a new printer. (Hence I print at every opportunity I can think of, in order to use up our ink supply ).
She quickly discovered a thin plastic control rod that was broken. After some brainstorming between the two of us, I managed to find some thin plastic that we could use as a splint, and my wife scotch taped the splint along side the broken control rod, holding it together.
She then managed to put the printer back together (again to my amazment), although not with out some difficulty, … and believe or not, the printer functioned! That was a year or so ago … it still functions !
Now the splint won’t last forever and so my wife and I have an agreement that as soon as we use up the last spare printer cartridge, we will purchase a new printer. (Hence I print at every opportunity I can think of, in order to use up our ink supply ).
I remember you telling that story some time ago. You’ve certainly got your monies worth out of that fix! I think too many give up too early with hardware - the ‘throw away’ mentality that the marketing people would prefer us to be like.
The wrong driver may force the heads to move beyond their course limits, damaging the mechanical hardware. If your exact printer model is not listed in Yast’s setup, then you should check HP’s site for the recommended driver. For example, an HP 7450 uses the hp7400 driver.
The way to reset these simple printers is just to turn them off, disconnect all cables, wait a minute or so and reconnect/turn it back on. If this doesn’t work, it’ll require maintenance. If it’s still under warranty you know what to do, if not you may try to fix it yourself, as oldcpu reported. The printer is so inexpensive that’s not worth paying to get it fixed, cheaper to buy another (after checking HP site for linux compatibility, of course :)).
what i think you should do is buy a car and drive it for about six
months or so until you know it operates…and, then instead of filling
it with gasoline just pour in some rocket fuel and crank’er up…if it
won’t start then pour some rocket fuel all over the engine and light
it…if it runs then, put your foot on the accelerator (to the floor=
until it blows up…
and, then write to the rocket fuel forum and ask’em if their fuel
destroyed your car…
and, if i’m on the rocket fuel forum when your post comes in i’ll tell
you that more than likely you killed your own car by not know what you
were doing and EXPERIMENTING without following any documentation
whatsoever while having absolutely no experience with using rocket
fuel in consumer automobiles…
Hi, thanks for the answers.
I opened the printer but I didn’t see anything obviously broken, it’s under warranty so I’ll just ask my local retailer.
To sum up, what I tried to do was :
plug printer
turn it on
open yast
add printer, see what happens
Step 2 seems to have killed the printer… BUT in step 4 it was correctly recognized (I did not have to specify the model), a driver and the software hplip were installed, which correctly labels the printer as HP D2560 and gives the same error messages as the windows driver, so I guess this printer is fully supported (hplip.com even says so).
So if the printer’s death is linux related, it was caused by plugging the printer before installing any drivers. That’s really surprising because it seemed so logical do to so (I’m more used to “plug and play” than “plug and die”).
Anyway I’m going to get another HP D2560 and see if it works, now that I have the driver, I guess the knowledge I’ll earn is worth the price of 2 cheap HP printers.
I’ve got a last question.
Was it really a bad idea to connect the device to the pc before installing the driver?
I’m really used to plug my devices and see what happens in order to install them (because I exclusively used windows before, btw that’s why the rocket fuel analogy quite surprised for me, I just didn’t see PCs and printers as things you can break by doing something wrong…). Is it something you should never do under Linux?
IMHO if the printer is broken, its unrelated to Linux, and it was just a coincidence that it happened at that time. If you had rebooted to Windows at that precise time, IMHO it probably would have failed under Windows.
).