HPLIP

Cannot print on Open Suse 42.1

Asked by philip mirabelli

hello, I have an tries and trusted HP Officejet Pro 8500A and it works fien using windows 10, I have installed Open Suse 42.1 and installed HPLIP version 3.14.6 but the printer won't print. It gets the command to print but then stalls and all I get is "unable to ppen the initial device, quitting" printed on the paper. I have tried to install HLPIP version 3.16.2 but it hangs in the terminal at half way installation at "RUNNING PRE-PACKAGE COMMANDS". I have got a print-out from HP doctor which concludes "Checking for HP Properitery Plugin's....
No plug-in printers are configured.

Diagnose completed..."

can you assist in seeing if I can get the printer to work? Many thanks Philip

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goutam kodu (goutam-hplip) said : 		#1

Hi Philip,

Can you try installing the HPLIP from hplip-3.16.2.tar.gz source package.
You can find the instructions for the same and download link in this post http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/install/manual/distros/novell.html

Let us know if you are still facing issues with it.

Thanks,
Goutam

Revision history for this message
Johannes Meixner (jsmeix) said : 		#2

When all you get is
"unable to open the initial device, quitting"
printed on the paper
it means there is an error while processig
the print job data.

"unable to open the initial device, quitting"
is a Ghostscript error message, see
http://www.ghostscript.com/doc/9.18/Issues.htm
(excerpt):
--------------------------------------------------------
When pdfwrite device cannot open
the output file it fails with:

Unable to open the initial device, quitting.
--------------------------------------------------------

I do not expect that such kind of issues go away
by installing a newer version of HPLIP because
the general print job data processing is not
implemented in HPLIP but nowadays mainly
in "cups-filters" (which is not from CUPS but
separated software from OpenPrinting.org).

Because in general cups-filters "just works"
on openSUSE Leap 42.1 one needs to analyze
what is extraordinary in your particular case
why Ghostscript cannot work "as usual" for you.

For how to do that see
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:How_to_Report_a_Printing_Issue

As a blind attempt that might make it work,
you could try an enforced (re)- install
of all cups-filters* RPMs which are:
cups-filters-ghostscript
cups-filters-cups-browsed
cups-filters-foomatic-rip
cups-filters

Revision history for this message
Johannes Meixner (jsmeix) said : 		#3

An addendum only FYI:

http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/models/officejet/officejet_pro_8500_a910.html
reads:
"APDK device class(es): Corbett"

I have no idea what it means
when a device is of type "Corbett".

I can only help if a device behaves like
a regular PCL or PostScript printer.

Because I cannot help when I don't know if a device
behaves like a regular PCL or PostScript printer or
if the device could have arbitrary special behaviour
I submitted
https://bugs.launchpad.net/hplip/+bug/1553096

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