Ubuntu Dapper & HP C4180

[^rooker]

Here's how to get scanning & printing going using a HP PSC C4180 on Ubunt u Dapper Drake (6.06.1):

1) The hplip version from the repositories is too old (at least it was when I did this: 27.Sep.2007)

2) So go to http://hplip.sourceforge.net/downloads.html and download Download the Self-Extracting Archive With Installer

3) Store it in some subdirectory (important, because it will mess up the directory you run it in!):

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mkdir ~/hplip

4) Run the installer script as non-privileged user:

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./hplip-2.7.7.run

5) Now follow the installation instructions (defaults were fine for me). Installation instructions can be found on the HPLIP site.

6) Now reboot your system (which you'll probably be asked for, at the end of the installer)


Now the prerequisites should be in place and it's time to finalize things:

Printing
1) run the HP configuration tool (this was posted in some forums, and a lot of people were wondering why they didn't have something called "hp-setup", but now you have it):

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hp-setup

2) Follow the instructions there and choose a suitable .ppd file (I gotta find out which one works best, but I'm currently using one for a 3100 and it seems to be ok)

Scanning:
1) Find the scanner:

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sane-find-scanner

Should now return this:

found USB scanner (vendor=0x03f0 [HP], product=0x5711 [Photosmart C4100 series]) at libusb:005:002

2) now run

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scanimage -L

to see if the backend loads properly. If this returns an output like this, you're done:

device 'hpaio:/usb/Photosmart_C4100_series?serial=MY76DJ12Z404J7' is a Hewlett-Packard Photosmart_C4100_series all-in-one

2b) [optional]
In my case "scanimage -L" got stuck - so I had to increase the debug verbosity level of scanimage:

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export SANE_DEBUG_DLL=255 ; scanimage -L

This told me that loading of "geniusvp2" backend caused the problem.

In order to solve this, I've removed the backend config file:

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mkdir /etc/sane.d/unused
mv /etc/sane.d/geniusvp2.conf /etc/sane.d/unused

And then removed the reference to it, by commenting the line "geniusvp2" out in /etc/sane.d/dll.d/libsane-extras

Run scanimage -L again to see if the problem persists.