Making HPLIP work

I finally got around to figuring out how to make HPLIP work under Kubuntu Breezy today. It turned out to be absurdly simple.

My problem was that the HPLIP toolbox refused to run because there were no HP printers set up in CUPS. Of course, that's not really correct, because I had set up my HP PhotoSmar 7760 in CUPS and it was working perfectly. However, because it wasn't setup using the hp:/ protocol, HPLIP couldn't access the advanced functionality, like the card reader, ink monitor, and so forth.

The solution was simply to remove and re-add the printer in the KDE print manager. Of course, this wasn't immediately obvious, as the choice for hp:/ protocol was lumped in under the "other printer" options on the printer type screen. I would have just used the CUPS web administration tool, but for some reason, the Ubuntu people saw fit to disable the administrative capabilities of the web front-end. Apparently it's for "security reasons," which doesn't make much sense to me because the default configuration limits access to the local host anyway. Oh well, I'm sure it seemed like a good idea to them.

Of course, if I hadn't hosed my system with a routine kernel upgrade last week, I woulnd't have had to go through this in the first place, but that's a story for another day.

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