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I'm running Ubuntu 24.04 with two USB printers, an HP laser printer, and a Cannon Ink Jet. Ubuntu sees them and is happy to send prints to them, and reports the printing was successful. However, the printers don't do a thing, no sign of life

Until recently I ran 23.10 on the same hardware and printers with no issues. 24.04 was a new install not an upgrade. I think I have successfully printed on 24.04 and something has changed today, but I can't be sure of that.

I do see today's error_log is full of driver errors like

Bad driver information file "/usr /share/ppd/openprinting/Utax/Global/English/TAPC3566i"!

The cups error logs prior today are close to empty. I'm thinking some update is the culprit.

Any thoughts?

Ken Mandelberg
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4 Answers4

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Auto discover USB printer

Try this first

  1. Turn the printer off.
  2. Connect the printer directly with the Ubuntu computer using a USB cable.
  3. Turn the printer back on.

This should auto detect the printer and install necessary driver.

Thanks to Simulan88 for the suggestion in comments.

Run hp-setup

Install hplip and hplip-gui from the terminal using this command:

sudo apt install hplip hplip-gui

If they are already installed you will get a message. These utilities include hp-setup. Run this program from the terminal as normal user:

hp-setup

It will open the Setup utility for HP printers. Follow the prompts. If your is connected via WiFi or Ethernet network, you may have to enter the IP address at the "Advanced" section.

Canon Printer

I don't have one of those. It may be possible to use Ubuntu's built-in printer setup to install the driver for it.

Go to Ubuntu Settings app. Select Printers on the left panel. At the bottom of the right panel Click on the Additional Printer Settings... button. Click on the + Add button on the new window that opens. It should detect your Canon printer. Follow the prompts to install the driver. You may have to select Canon > your printer model at the driver selection page if your printer is not detected.

hope this helps

user68186
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0

I had similar problems after the upgrade to 24.04 and after much investigation I was able to come up with the following which seemed to work. There's seems to be some remnants of old config and some executables that didn't get deployed properly during the upgrade.

**NOTE: This will uninstall all hplip support in the process so any HP printers/scanners you have that are working will be uninstalled in the process.

First, I ran below to get a list of currently installed:

apt search hplip

I then went through the list of packages and purged all that were installed. You may have different packages. In my case it was:

apt purge printer-driver-hpcups libsane-hpaio libhpmud0 hplip-data

Make note of any files/directories that were not removed by the install. I had to manually remove those which I think was the key. Reinstalling the packages didn't seem to do the trick. I had also tried purging and installing again and that didn't work either.

In my case these directories needed to be removed: /etc/hp /usr/share/hplip

After those were removed, I installed only hplip:

apt install hplip

Then, I needed to run the hp-setup program. It's best to run that as a normal user and not with sudo or sudo -s. I chose a manual install in the wizard under advanced and entered the IP of my printer. I picked it up and installed it and printed the test page.

Hopefully this helps. I see a lot of people having issues with HP printers and scanners after the upgrade from 22.04 or 23.10 to 24.04. Perhaps there's some issue in the upgrade process with these packages. If it's the same issue I had, this should fix it.

Good luck!

trademarq
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For now, both the official package from the HP website and hplip-gui do not work in Ubuntu 24.04. So I tried to only use hplip from the terminal and the printer works. From terminal do these commands:

$ sudo apt install hplip
$ hp-setup

For the scanner I used Document scanner (preinstalled in Ubuntu 24.04) and it works quite well.

For more features we have to patiently wait for the new package from the HP site that supports Ubuntu 24.04 (I had to uninstall all other packages regarding hplip)

klleshi
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I right clicked on the printer and hit "search for drivers". It's now working.

It originally detected it as a HP printer. "search for drivers" successfully identified it.

Mine was a Canon E410 on Ubuntu 24.04

Lim Min Chien
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