OK, assuming I'm testing it right, Pat's patch works here, too.

I commented out LC_ALL=C in /etc/profile/lang.sh to set the sorting rules back to en_US like they're supposed to be, applied Pat's patch (That's the first patch I've ever applied, ever, so thanks for making me learn how to do that, btw) and hp-setup -i 192.168.1.65 found the ppd and offered to set up the new printer cue.

so for the problems that I and others have had, it looks like we got 3 solutions to fix them:

1. export LANG=en before running hp-setup -i
2. export LC_ALL=C before running hp-setup -i
3. use Pat's patch on /usr/share/hplip/setup.py

Kudos and thanks to kjhambrick and Pat for taking the time to look at the problem and finding the answer.

1 members found this post helpful.

Awesome, thanks for testing it! Since I'm a bit of a Luddite, that's the only line of Python I've ever written.

3 members found this post helpful.

Thanks all !

I certainly learned a lot about hplip.

I never needed it before my wife got her MFP printer / FAX / scanner.

Now it all 'just' works for me.

Thanks again !

-- kjh

p.s. as for being a python luddite -- I am still a complete luddite having never written a single line of python code

OK, my final, final, super final last test:

Clean install of latest current, didn't touch any LANG or LC settings. I had backed up the patched setup.py, so all I did was copy that over to /usr/share/hplip and run hp-setup -i 192.168.1.65 and ...

it worked exactly the same way that I've come to expect from other distros. Found the printer, downloaded the ppd, setup the print cue and printed the test page. I finished it off with a lpoptions -d [printer] and Bob was my uncle. (A generic Bob, not THE Bob.)

So now this thread is finally, super-duper really solved, hopefully for the rest of forever.

1 members found this post helpful.

Loooks like there were a couple of updates. I'll be doing a fresh -current install on a laptop and will see if that fixes this issue here.
EDIT: I really need to refresh my browser pages more often....