Linux Mint Mate 19.3 2009 ASUS motherboard, no wifi, no bluetooth, no wireless router except from my satellite modem. I want a single wired connection between my computer and my printer. I do not trust the privacy of wireless.

I purchased an HP Envy Pro 6452 All in One because 1) HP is supposed to support Linux better than any other company, and because I wanted a scanner with automatic document feed, copier ability, and a usb connection. When I first went to install it, I discovered that HPLIP in the Mint repository did not cover this printer.

I'm not at all conversant with Terminal Commands and repositories, nor do I understand the Synaptic Package Manager. I just went to Synaptic and searched for HPLIP. It showed version 3.17.10 plus repack0-5 as installed on my computer. After an internet search, I found that I needed 3.20.5 to cover this printer, so I downloaded and installed it. That presented numerous problems, and I cannot immediately recall the sequence; I do recall that "out of paper" was a huge problem, and I could not find the paper tray.

The printer did not come with any explanation of where things were, and when I searched for one, the HP Customer Support service was offline. So I went and asked for help from the Linux Mint printer forum.

A user offered to help me install driverless printing and scanning. He found a printer manual for me, and I was finally able to find the paper tray. I agreed because I desperately needed to print something ASAP. The first thing I did, per instructions, was purge the provided "ippusbxd" and replace it with "ipp-usb". The printer printed. Then I installed " sane-airscan_0.99.4+62.1_amd64.deb". Simple Scan worked. I can print and scan.

My problem is as follows:
The electronic printer control panel, which provides copying, printer maintenance and information, as well as connection controls (the printer is wireless by default, and the control panel allows one to remove the wireless connection) does not work. Also the printer has an automatic document feeder which does not work. So while I can print and scan, about half of the printer's capabilities are non-functional.

Is there any way that I can get these capabilites to work without removing what I have done and installing the HPLIP version that supports this printer?

If I do need to uninstall both ipp-usb and Simple Scan how would I go about purging them from my computer?

Do I need to reinstall ippusbxd for HPLIP to work? Installing the updated version of HPLIP seems to be pretty automatic, and now that paper is in the paper tray, there is no reason why it shouldn't work. But given Murphey's law, it probably won't if I try to do this without help.

The Linux Mint user who helped me install the driverless printing and scanning thinks he has finished with me since I can print and scan.

I reckon you've been around linux for years if you registered here in 2013, so saying you're not up with console commands doesn't cut much ice at this stage. Go learn them. There's a man page for just about every one of them, even for some of the config commands.

Look at apt's man page to understand the package manager. You'll need that Now consider the problem for one tiny second from someone else's POV.

• "The printer did not come with an explanation" = he hasn't read the manual. I've news for you friend; Neither have we.
• "There's some printer control panel…" Great- control the printer, or post that one on your Mint forums It ought to be printing & adding a page feed pretty quickly. I have no idea what this is part of.
• "The wireless connection does not work…" It's usually fairly simple to set up a wireless connection with NetworkManager. I'm forced to use it on one machine, and setup was as simple as giving it a password for WPA Encryption. Your security worries are justified if you leave the connection open (No password required and anyone can log in) but you can enable wpa encryption which is good and standard encryption.

My experience is that linux works on everything, but sometimes lands jammy side down. That's OK, just turn it back and add more jam if needed. If you're tidy, clean up.Then it works like a dream.

1 members found this post helpful.

vineyridge,

I realise I am 2 years late to the party. I also realise you have been trying to connect the printer via USB.

Still, I just made my Envy 6400 series work on 5G WiFi, on Slackware-15.0. The steps can be replicated on any distro, so I thought I'd share them, maybe yourself or someone else will find them useful.

The connection part:
1) Follow the printer's instructions to connect to WiFi 5G -- yes, for this part you do need to read the damn manual. But there's a gotcha here. In your router, make sure Wireless mode is set to "802.11a/n/ac mixed". If you prefer "802.11ac" because you want things tidy, then you'd be out of luck (don't waste time figuring it out ).

The scanner part:
2) On WiFi, we need the sane-airscan package. It has one dependency: avahi, which itself has one dependency: libdaemon. Installing these packages on Mint might be straightforward because it has a graphical package manager.

3) As root, edit your /etc/sane.d/dll.conf and make sure you have the escl backend listed and no # in front of it. For faster scanner initialisation, you could put a # in front of every other line, so that sane doesn't try them all during startup.

4) As normal user, in a terminal, type scanimage -L. If you see your device listed then you are done with the scanner part. But do make a note of your printer/scanner's IP address, we'll need it in step 6).

The printer part:
5) We need at least hplip-3.21.4 (that's the version in which HP included the Envy 6400 series). I use the latest hplip-3.22.4, which has avahi as a dependency, but we already got it from step 2).

6) As normal user, on the command line, type hp-setup <IP-Address from step 4)>. See your device listed? Good, go through the works.

7) Done. Watch cups and sane work their magic. Even the document feeder works -- oh yeah!

Again, hope these instructions are useful to someone.

kdato