[H-GEN] HP officejet 6310 and suse10.1

Mon Sep 18 08:48:07 EDT 2006

Thanks Michael,

That explains it.  Actually, after three hours downloading, it did finish and the installation eventually worked (after having to delete the still resident HP OJ package, then go back and do it all again).

Anyway, the result is I now have both printing and scanning.  So, it is problem solved.

After two months or so, that now completes the basic conversion from win98se to recovering all the basic functionality under linux.  So, Thanks All for your inputs along the way, along with my apologies for having been so slow, so often.

I did not really intend to use linux when I set up this machine - it was supposed to be just an exercise to see where the community was at.  

On the one hand, it was a sufficiently non-trivial and poorly supported exercise that I do not feel it appropriate to recommend linux to other windows users at this time.  On the other hand, once the pain has been endured and a working whatever achieved, there is no comparison with windows based alternatives   

Stability is not the main advantage (although that's all I'd expected to find).  The baseline software is infinitely superior (and the price is also right!), the  desktop (I'm using KDE) is also superior, applications load in half the time, suspend works properly so one  gets effectively reduced boot times, etc etc.  

It's like having, for the first time since 1980, a machine that works according my concept of what a personal computer should be like.  

Against my expectations, I now envisage the day in the not too distant future when I dump that other (windows) box altogether.

Thanks again.

regards.... andrew.

Michael Mollard <molm at cvxmck.edu.au> wrote:        When you add a repository using yast, yast downloads the entire catalog of files etc.  If you have 'refresh' turned on, then this catalog is downloaded each time that part of yast is used/updated.
 I used to kill the processes as well, because I thought nothing was happening, but now I add the repositories, allow the catalog downloads, turn off refresh, and simply turn them on when I need to get some software.  I'm pretty sure the auto- update system will still grab updates correctly.
 Also, I'm reading today that openSuse 10.2 has greatly improved the speed of these sort of things.  I'm downloading 10.2 alpha4 to see how it compares ..

 andrew laidlaw wrote:    
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 Hi all,

 I'd hoped this would just be a thank you to anthony irwin and greg black for their advice (responding to an earlier question about printers under unix in general and lexmark winprinters in particular).  I finally got a slice of time today to turf the old printer, and follow the humbug advice as best I could interpret/reconcile it.  Alas, all is not quite as simple as one might have hoped....

 I purchased an HP officejet 6310 because:

 1. It does everything I need (and more)
 2. It appears to conform with the gist of the humbug advice
 3. linuxprinting.org "blessed" that model
 4. It supports largish ink tanks for which I can get refill inks
 5. It isn't on the verge of reaching its end of product life as far as I can tell.

 First I installed the printer.  Yast offered a default HP officejet 630, which I accepted, and this gets the printer part working fine, both B&W and colour  (It's using CUPS - sorry greg).  The fact that my system is USB 1.1 (which had been a minor concern) seems not to be a problem after all.

 Turning to install the scanner part, Yast offers two options under the listing for HP officejet 630, one is for "HPLIP", the other "HPOJ".  The HPOJ option fails, and documentation at sourceforge shows that HPLIP is in any case the preferred option, one that is to be supported going forward, so I have just focussed on HPLIP.  

 The 630 installation/configuration goes through error free with yast2, but following installation the (correctly recognised by Yast2) HP6310 multifunction device remains still in the "unconfigured" state, whilst the newly installed HPaio driver has not recognised any relevant scanning devices.  No scanning type software works, or finds any available scanner.

 Sourceforge, the repository of the HPLIP printer project, informs that HPLIP support for the HPOJ6310 requires a more recent version of HPLIP than ships with suse10.1  (in fact what they ship is at least five versions out of date!).  So I am presently trying to install the newly released (15 september) HPLIP 1.6.9.   Again, there are two options, a self-extracting archive and a tar archive.  I extracted the latter (using ark), but the installer would not run. 

 As for the self-extracting archive, after modifying permissions on the downloaded file (using konqueror gui), the installer at least runs.  After a few steps, it asks the user to add the following sources to Yast's list of installation sources:

 http://suse.mirrors.tds.net/pub/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.1/inst-source/
 http://mirrors.kernel.org/suse/i386/10.1/SUSE-Linux10.1-GM-Extra

 I did this using the yast2 gui interface, installation sources, ADD, URL option.  Each of the new sources was accepted (in about ten seconds on my 64k line).  Then, I assume, one just presses the finish button and reverts to the installer, which is running in a shell.  

 However, at this point, instead of finishing the Yast procedure, activity starts on the internet line, with no indication of what is being downloaded, or how long it is going to take.  It's been running for about two hours now, with no sign of stopping, so I suppose it's grabbed at least 40 MB (of what?) by now.  

 I've tried this whole procedure a couple of times previously, ending up killing the yast process (it just won't abort) because the very next thing the installer is going to do (after it complains some about the missing dependencies* )  is to initiate (the text version of) Yast (which won't work due to the preexisting instance still running).  Unsurprisingly, this does not lead forward either.  Returning to Yast's installation sources list, the previously accepted new installation sources have disappeared.  So, it seems I have to allow that download to finish??

 Or am I just not getting this?

 The options seem to be:

 a) Wait for the download to finish.
 b) get the tar archive's installer to run
 c) attempt manual installation
 d) take the product back to officeworks and replace it with something different.
 e) try one of the four or five older versions of HPLIP that supports the 6310 devicde but hasn't been released in the last week.
 e) Other(s)?

 *  Yes, I deleted the previously installed older version of hplip in line with instructions pertaining to the not working tar version installer.  This required overriding Yast's complaints re: introducing dependency problems

 Many thanks in advance for any recommendations you all can proffer.

 regards.... andrew.

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Michael Mollard
Information Systems Administrator
Clairvaux MacKillop College, Brisbane. Australia.
molm at cvxmck.edu.au http://www.cvxmck.edu.au  Phone       07 3347 4607       07 3349 8977  Fax       07 3349 5677

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