I have Fedora 7 and I just bought an HP printer for it. The Package manager has the hplip 1.7.4a-6.fc7.i385, and appears to have listed the printer in the way that I feel it should. Is it possible that because it is a newer printer than the software it will not load properly. There is one aspect I feel could be a problem but cannot find a way to solve it. There are at last count 20 print jobs in the print queue. The other question I asked the print set-up had to do with CUPS, and it showed the CUPS`connection had failed. I have a ways to go in my reading of the Introduction To Linux. Is the solution in my knowledge of the Command Line?
I read the similar threads and find nothing there. One last question should
I delete the whole install (if I can) and re-install would it help?

Are you really running Fedora 7? If so you probably would want to install the newest version which is up to 17. Fedora 7 is long since unsupported.

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I thought for a moment that "Fedora 7" was a mistake for "Fedora 17", but of course it isn't. You've got hplip 1.7 and the current version is 3.12 — no wonder it can't cope with a new printer! Get the latest Fedora and start again.

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My thanks to j kirchner and David McCann for their reply to my question Printer won't print. I had suspected that was a possibility as the hplip file number in the package manager was different than the one that I had from hplipopensource. The replies however raises another question I have been asking myself. The reply was “Are you really using Fedora 7”? I have another question related to that, “am I flogging a dead horse in trying to run a program that old”?

Well, yes. As you see, the old repository is still there and you can get things from it. But, if I remember correctly, the other repositories (e.g. RPMfusion) don't leave old versions on-line, so you're limited to Fedora only: no playing mp3 or wmv files, for example. Also, support for Fedora 7 stopped a month after Fedora 9 came out. If there's a security hole in any of the software, no-one's going to fix it now. Admittedly, if there was a serious problem it would probably have been discovered in the 13 month support period, but you never know...

The real point is that using old versions has no point. Some-one may stick with Windows 2000 because it's all they can run, or because they can't afford an upgrade, or because they like it (!). With Linux coming free, in varieties suited to every taste and computer model, it makes sense to get the current software that is supported by its producers and which other users can help you with.