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I'm using Ubuntu MATE 16.04.5 LTS with all current updates and HPLIP from official Ubuntu repository:

$ dpkg -l | grep hplip
ii  hplip       3.16.3+repack0-1   amd64  HP Linux Printing and Imaging System (HPLIP)
ii  hplip-data  3.16.3+repack0-1   all    HP Linux Printing and Imaging - data files
ii  hplip-gui   3.16.3+repack0-1   all    HP Linux Printing and Imaging - GUI utilities (Qt-based)

$ apt-cache policy hplip-gui 
hplip-gui:
  Installed: 3.16.3+repack0-1
  Candidate: 3.16.3+repack0-1
  Version table:
 *** 3.16.3+repack0-1 500
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/universe amd64 Packages
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/universe i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

If I try to find its XDG-file I get:

$ dpkg -L hplip-gui | grep "xdg.*desktop"
/etc/xdg/autostart/hplip-systray.desktop

It starts with the command:

$ cat /etc/xdg/autostart/hplip-systray.desktop | grep Exec
Exec=hp-systray -x

If I launch it manually I get:

$ hp-systray -x

HP Linux Imaging and Printing System (ver. 3.16.3)
System Tray Status Service ver. 2.0

Copyright (c) 2001-15 HP Development Company, LP
This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
This is free software, and you are welcome to distribute it
under certain conditions. See COPYING file for more details.

Segmentation fault (core dumped)

The system integrity is OK - I do not get any error output from debsums --all --changed.

The question - why HPLIP Systray is crashed and what should I do to make it working again?

N0rbert
  • 103,263

1 Answers1

1

First of all we need to determine file type of hp-systray:

$ which hp-systray 
/usr/bin/hp-systray
$ file $(which hp-systray)
/usr/bin/hp-systray: symbolic link to ../share/hplip/systray.py
$ file $(readlink -f $(which hp-systray))
/usr/share/hplip/systray.py: Python script, ASCII text executable

- so it is Python script.

Then by reading crash dump at /var/crash/_usr_share_hplip_systray.py.1000.crash we can determine the following. The crashdump contain references to python modules, installed by pip3:

...
ProcMaps:
...
 ... /usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages/sip.so
 ... /usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages/sip.so
 ... /usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages/sip.so
 ... /usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages/sip.so

So we need to remove problematic sip module with

sudo pip3 uninstall sip

It solved HPLIP problem as it will use sip from python3-sip package.

But removing sip breaks ReText which was installed from pip3 too.
To fix it we need to:

  • adjust ReText dependencies to get it working:

    sudo -H pip3 install sip==4.18 PyQt5-sip==4.19.11 PyQt5==5.7 retext

    but this method results in slow text editing and cursor movement on some not too new hardware.

  • remove deb/APT version of hplip as described on my other answer and then install ReText with:

    sudo -H pip3 install PyQt5==5.9.2 retext

    Note: PyQt 5.9.2 is needed to have normal operation of Chromium (WebKit) renderer and coexistence with Spyder3.

N0rbert
  • 103,263