I've been using Linux for about a year now and haven't encountered any printing problems until now with my HP Officejet 6500A. What is happening now is it basically will only print one document and then the printer device manager (hplip) will say the printer is off when it is clearly connected and powered up, but it will print if I turn the printer off and try again. Sometimes, I also seem to need to restart the computer for it work. Also, when I scan documents, it will only scan 1, maybe 2, pages of the document and then it will perpetually be procesing in Simple Scan and then gives me an option to force quit. Xsane and Simple Scan both do this. Furthermore, xsane and Simple Scan will quit printint or scanning after one document and give output that says there is no printer or scanner. Ive already confirmed that it's not the USB cable. What could it be? This has happened in both Linux Mint 12 (Main Edition) and Linux Mint Debian Edition. I hope someone can help me figure out what's wrong!

This could be hardware -- your printer may be about to go. If you've experienced the same problem on two separate machines (rather than two virtual machines on the same platform) it might be useful to replace the USB cable with another (if you haven't already done that), use a different USB port, stuff like that.

Otherwise it might be software. So, first thing I'd do is get the latest version (3.12.6) of HPLIP directly from Hewlett-Packard at http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/index.html. You can try the Download HPLIP button at the web page or you can click the Download link at the left column; there is a section "Advanced users may wish to download the HPLIP tar package." that you can click for the hplip-3.12.6.tar.gz file if that works better for you.

Also, you need to be at least at cups-1.4.6 and ghostscript-9.02, there were problems with both packages' earlier versions (there might be one other package that's necessary but I'm not positive which one -- the system requirement at the H-P website above should tell you that).

It could also be as simple as removing and reinstalling the printer (using hp-setup, possibly deleting the printer from CUPS first) or execute
as root then reinstall your copy of HPLIP.

Hope this helps some.

@Tronayne

I'll give this a try and report back what I find. I relied on the fact that the printer was automatically detected.

Don't forget that hp-setup does detect your printer -- this USB stuff is kind of nice for that sort of thing -- when you walk through the setup. Too, hp-setup does the CUPS entries for you (handy). The benefit of getting the latest-and-greatest from H-P is that they do a good job of keeping things up to date as well as fixing whatever might have been missed in the printer models. It's kind of nice that a vendor cares about more than just the Windows folks; H-P is one of those, fully supporting their products in Linux.

And, sometimes, you just have to wipe out what was there and reinstall; pain in the hiney, but something can get hosed and the only good way to un-hose it is a clean install. Who knows what daemons are running around in there playing tricks, eh?

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