DEbian 7.8.0 on 64bit laptop:
On my old Mepis12 (Wheezy) system there was a entry in
system Systems under hardware, where you could define
a printer. There doesn't appear be such on Debian 7.8.0,
I need to configure a wireless connection to my HP6700.
Itried "localhost:631" but this failed.

You may need hplilp. Be sure it's up to date.

http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web...ejet_6700.html

Fortunately I already had the latest hplip downloaded (3.14.10)
It said aspects of Debian 7.8.0 were not fully supported, and
maybe I should try the Debiab 7.6 version.
But proceeded. It made no changes to system settings, and
localhost:631 still fails

If browsing to 'localhost:631' fails, then the cupsd daemon is probably not running. Check that first.

cupsd is running. After a reboot an HP icon appeared in the system tray,
but otherwise no change (no printer)

The suggestion to make sure CUPS is running is a good one. Once you've made sure that it is running, remember that HPLIP will not discover your printer automatically.

This page gives a short tutorial on how to use hpsetup, which is part of the HPLIP package.

well, I'll have to wait a while on the wireless printer.
A massive power outage has trashed my desktop system -
rescue disk used to run fsck on all partitions, but it
still won't boot. Which is lucky for that the printer
was the last thing I needed to get working.
So my hand is forced, and I'm installing debian 7.8.0
on my HP desktop system.
Fortunately cron did a full backup of /home at 1am, so
I may have lost a few emails, but otherwise the laptop
is now the main system. I still have a couple of things
to do (not on the laptop, but on the desktop) skype and
vbox, and I still need to check flashplayer - they seem
to change it rather often. Backups now running from
my laptop.
Thanks for all the help, your response times are fantastic!