My respect for your effort and thoroughness Nominal_Animal. Thank you for sharing your knowledge .

My HP-Deskjet F3800 all-in-one works properly as printer and as scanner under Linux. It was be tested under OpenSuse, Aptosid, fedora 14, Mandriva/Mageia. But under FreeBSD I can not start it, though I install all drivers. May be it arise because under freeBSD I compilled KDE 3?

Have you enabled the Linux binary compatibility stuff by running kldload linux as root?

Also, have you checked using ldd that all the 32-bit dynamic library dependencies have been fulfilled? See the end of my earlier post for the commands, there are quite a few.

1 members found this post helpful.

For years you've been able to count on your HP printers including all-in-ones working. HP scanners are sane so they work as well. The HPLIP toolbox gives access to all features such as ink levels.

CUPS software used to be horrible. I would spent hours bouncing back and forth between the browser interface, the command-line tools and editing files in /etc, cursing it as I went.

But in recent years, it's pretty much just worked.

Though every once in a while, for reasons I don't know, I have to run /usr/sbin/cupsenable to reenable the printer.

Is there/here a list for the printers reported working under, say, Puppy Linux 528?

A lot of printers are terminally incomparable with linux. This is most true of low end printers which do not have Ethernet connectivity. If a company uses proprietary interfaces, then linux connectivity will only appear late ( because somebody clever reverse engineers the product), and then only if the product is very popular. Some companies either actively support linux (HP has a longstanding association with Unix) or consistently produce 'standards compliant' printers which work with standard tools. This latter approach is more expensive, because it assumes that the processing will be native to the printer, rather than present in software. This divergence appeared almost 20 years ago when Microsoft backed so-called 'win printers' which did not have internal postscript processing hardware. For various reasons (including, but not limited to, the fact that Microsoft continues to actively pursue low cost points of product differentiation) it remains true that, often, a printer supplied for free with a computer, will never work under linux, or will work so badly as to be not worth the trouble. Turboprint bridges part of the gap. If Turboprint does not work to your satisfaction (for whatever reason) give up.

Sorry to be so negative.

There is your problem. You are using Fedora. Might as well use Android. Get a real OS such as Ubuntu, Debian, Mandriva, or openSUSE. You got the printer in 2008! Dude, throw it away and go get an HP laserjet for about $100. That 5 year old printer was probably a GDI printer intended for Microsoft OS. Second, Once you have openSUSE installed, and running right, download virtual box from Oracle. You can then install your Windows OS and run it as a virtual machine inside of Linux. A whole new world my boy, a whole new world. No need to dual boot anymore.

Master Rod

@rrdonovan

I have noticed of late that you are posting and not being helpful nor constructive to the OP or thread. LQ Rules;
Please take into consideration whether or not your post will be helpful therefore constructive to the thread/OP. If not helpful/constructive then do not post!