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G'day all, I'm due for a new all-in-one printer/scanner. I'm thinking of a HP Officejet 6600 with wifi. Apparently it does I-printing as well. I can't find a straight forward driver for CUPS so this leads to a number of questions:

  1. Does anyone have any experience with the machine? Recommendations?? and/or alternative?
  2. Does it require HPLIP?
  3. How does HPLIP compare to CUPS?
  4. Do they conflict? ie. must I remove CUPS?

Any advice is sincerely welcome.

ozxpat
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2 Answers2

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I had the same issue and could not find information that would help make the scanner work.

I installed the hplip-gui package as suggested above. My only note is that it did not detect my printer. I "manually" detected by entering the IP address.

After finding and configuring the printer, "simple scan" detected my printer and enabled scanning!

Yokai
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I can't find a straight forward driver for CUPS

What have you tried?

My friend just got an HP OfficeJet 6600. He's got Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS. He uses a direct USB connection to the printer though--he doesn't print over the network. He is not using the fax or scanning features (yet).

Cups is working for him, so it does not require HPLIP. He hasn't tried HPLIP (to my knowledge), so I can't say how it compares. I'm not sure if they can both be installed at the same time.

The Ubuntu printer setup GUI (Dash or System Settings → Printers → Add) helped him set it up. The driver that appears to be working for him is "HP Officejet 6500 e709n hpijs, 3.12.2". Note that this was not the default/recommended one in the printer setup GUI.

HPLIP claims to support scanning and other features. Seems like you could just try:

sudo apt-get install hplip-gui

That uses KDE, so if you've got a stock Ubuntu (and not, for instance, Kubuntu), that will install a ton of KDE/Qt packages. But it should work. And you shouldn't have to worry about conflicts, the package maintainers have presumably worked that out for you.

If you don't want all the extra KDE/Qt packages, here's what I'd recommend.

  1. install the hplip and hplip-cups packages
  2. reboot, then add your printer

It might just find the right driver and start working.

Unless you need color and rarely print, I highly, highly recommend any laser printer over any inkjet printer. You'll pay much less on toner than you would on ink over the life of the printer. In general I stick with Brother lasers because their GNU/Linux support seems solid. I use the MFC-8840D. Network printing and scanning work ok with the MFC-8840D.

Adam Monsen
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