Print Manger Connects to Wireless Brother but HP Fails

[VtPoet]

I'm trying to set up LMDE for my wife on her MIni. I hit a brick wall today. I was able to install our home wireless printer, a brother (prints beautifully); but the HP printer at work simply refuses to cooperate. When I add "new printer", cups finds the HP, recognizes it, ostesibly installs the correct driver, but when I attempt to print, I keep getting an error. (When I get back to the office this afternoon I can offer more info if necessary). Strangest of all, I seem to get status updates from the HP printer - "Printer is Idle" and that sort of thing. It "sees" the printer and seems to connect, but can't print? (The printer installed perfectly when she was running Mint 9 Isodora.) Let me just start by asking, does this sound familiar? Also, I tried installing installing hplip-3.11.12 but get the error:

warning: Qt/PyQt 4 initialization failed.
error: hp-systray requires Qt4 GUI and DBus support. Exiting.

Any guidance, nearterm, would be deeply appreciated.

[robw]

Hi VtPoet

Did you install the hplip file from a 3rd party source? In stalling hplip has always sorted any HP printer I've owned (I like them) but it seems that the version you have is newer than that contained in the repositories. I'm wondering if your problem is that your driver maybe expects a technology your printer doesn't have. perhaps you could try deleting the current driver and just install the version available from the repos? On my system it says that is 3.11.7 (I installed LMDE for my daughter and don't currently have access to that system - I'm looking on LM12 at the moment).

Seems to me this might remedy the problem given:

a. It worked OK on LM9
b. Your error msg seems to indicate a minor fault rather than a major incompatibility
c. Your PC seems to be talking to the printer but is prevented from printing by that seemingly minor issue.

Give it a try?

[VtPoet]

Thanks Robw. I'm so frustrated I almost want to go back to Windows -- .

I had been running Mint 9 on her Mini. Beautiful little OS. Everything worked except the scanner. I needed to update her OS in order to use the latest XSANE. LISA is a complete wash in my opinion. I don't like Unity - despise the launcher. I don't like G3 and Cinnamon is just too beta-ish for my wife. Gnome & Shuttleworth, between them, have trashed desktop linux. XFCE has become my favorite desktop. So I installed LMDE. On the HP Mini- LMDE would randomly drop her wireless connection (low-power b43 chipset). Looks like a bug. I took her netbook to the office and couldn't connect the printer. I've had niggling little issues with LMDE on my own laptop so I thought this was yet another LMDE (or Debian) glitch. With that and the randomly dropping connection, I reluctantly wiped LMDE and installed Xubuntu 11.10. The wireless stopped randomly droping, but the printer still doesn't work - so it's an HPLIP (?) problem of some kind. If I had known this I might have tried to save LMDE. I would re-install tonight if I thought I could solve the wireless issue, but googling leads to nothing but dead ends. If it were my own computer I would take the time to sort it out. Since it's hers, I need to solve it yesterday. Don't take that as a put-down. Just the way it is...