Photosmart 7960 freezes on some print jobs

Asked by Christopher A. Chavez

Hi,
I am running HPLIP 3.13.6 from the automatic installer on Ubuntu 14.04. I have a Photosmart 7960, which, as others have described in questions and bugs over the past several years for this and similar models, will often (but not always) freeze on some print jobs when installed from HPLIP to the point that the power to the printer must be unplugged/shut off. I also notice that the process "hp" might go into runaway CPU usage, at least when the failed job is cancelled. Also, I am using the printer in ink-backup mode (I only have the HP 57 tricolor cartridge installed), but I am not able to find out at the moment if that is a condition for this issue. I have attached the output from hp-logcapture for an example problematic job (LibreOffice Writer 4.2.4 - job name is "Mia Eleanor Roosevelt New").
I understand that this model, being nearly 11 years old, has reached End of Support, but I would like to help investigate this at least to where, if not enough for a developer can contribute an fix, I can at least document a reference workaround (e.g. on the Ubuntu wiki). The current workaround of switching to the CUPS usb:// URI connection is at the expense of monitoring and maintaining the printer using HPLIP.

Revision history for this message
Christopher A. Chavez (chrstphrchvz) said :
#1

It looks like Launchpad doesn't support attachments to questions. Here's a link on Google Drive to the hp-logcapture output (hplip_troubleshoot_logs.tar.gz): http://goo.gl/4GCHkY

Revision history for this message
Christopher A. Chavez (chrstphrchvz) said :
#2

Here's some (possibly) related questions:

#52600 - photosmart 7960 printer freezes when printing
#38332 - Photosmart 7960 Printer freeze when a document is sent to print
#104689 - HP photosmart 7960 is idle can't communicate
#237388 - HPLIP/Ubuntu fails to complete print job correctly
#67764 - laser printer not working
#82145 - hp photosmart 7762 doesn't work
#104978 - HP Photosmart 7760 on Open Suse 11.2
#72278 - Photosmart 7660 Communication Error 5012
#70960 - Device comm. error 5012 with second printing attempt
#98527 - Hp Photosmart 7260 doesn't work properly under Ubuntu 9.10
#73031 - Photosmart 7450 hangs after printing

I also get the error code 5012 when the print job freezes the printer.

Would writing a FAQ for this be appropriate?

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