Cups upgrade issue (And good news)
 

ArchLinux on Athlon 2400XP, 1G RAM, 100s of Gbytes of disk, endlessly flogged by distro-hopping and refusing to die. HP 1022 Laser printer--equally indestructable.

For this install, I never bothered with HPLIP. I've never totally understood it, and never seen evidence that I needed it.

All is going well until I decide to do a system-wide upgrade. Among other things, this takes CUPS from v 1.3.9 to v 1.4.1. Before long, the printer is gone. All of the usual tricks fail.

Boot into Mint (it just happened to be there). It is still on CUPS 1.3.9. It has no trouble finding the printer, but only with HPLIP. The usual auto-detected usb connection is not there.

Back to Arch, install HPLIP, and the printer now shows up exactly as it did in Mint. So perhaps the CUPS version was irrelevant.

I'm constantly tweaking things so there's no reasonable way to establish cause and effect here.


Any ideas?

For HP's, especially new ones where you plan to use SANE for the AIO features, I'd recommend using HPLIP. I'm not familiar with arch, but with some versions of Slackware, I needed to download the current HPLIP source from HP (it's a bunch of Python scripts--I can't believe HP wrote it--it's so good). As you mentioned, CUPS recognizes HPLIP, and I believe I've used some HPLIP scripts to configure a CUPS printer. Lately I've been using Ubuntu and getting really spoiled, since it practically autosenses the printers and the setup for CUPS and HPLIP.

The problems I run into with CUPS usually have to do with the various versions of gs per version of CUPS where PDF's don't always interpret well.

More data:

I just ran the same steps on another system----same result: With cups 1.3.X, it seems that HPLIP is not required. With 1.4.1, the printer is not detected without it.

And......
I cannot install my Epson Stylus Photo 2200---it also worked under cups 1.3.X

Google....

Archlinux says: "disable usblp module"

Now it works!!

I was going to say that there was an announcement about the cups upgrade on Arch's homepage ... but you got it

It's getting better!!

The new version of CUPS has the Epson head test and head cleaning built-in (and they work!!)

Maybe Linux is ready for the Desktop after all........;)