Fragmented Development

Recently I had to print at work, which required installing a printer on Ubuntu, so I thought I'd share how it went. Long story short: It went awesome.

First of all, I checked with OpenPrinting (now run by the Linux Foundation) to make sure if our office MFP was supported; and indeed, it was. In fact, it looked like it was supported by a whole bunch of different Linux printing methods. I'm most familiar with CUPS, so I did it that way.

Before I tried to install it, I made sure I had the HP drivers installed through the Ubuntu repositories. The packages are called hplip and hplip-cups; if you're using a Ubuntu-based system, you might even be able to click right on those links and have them installed. Otherwise, a quick search with Synaptic or Add/Remove Software should do the trick.

To install the printer, just visit the CUPS admin page, and follow the prompts. That was it - printing in just a couple minutes.

The only snag I ran into was the printer selection page of the process; it searched my whole network for ANY available printers, so I had a gigantic list of generic-sounding HP models. Luckily, we have the only HP 4345 in the building, so I was able to pick it out.

While I'm mostly posting this so that I can remember myself, who knows; maybe somebody will find this useful.