CUPSEXT could not be loaded

Please run hp-check -t and post the output.

Also run

/usr/lib/cups/backend/hp -h

and post that output as well.

A

hp-check and hp-setup

just don't run, but output the error message I said before

"CUPSEXT could not be loaded . Please check HPLIP installation

hp-check -t gives the same behavior

/usr/lib/cups/backend/hp -h:

HP Linux Imaging and Printing System
CUPS Backend 2.8.2
(c) 2003-2007 Copyright Hewlett-Packard Development Company, LP

Okay.

please run hp-check -t and post all the output that appears. from when you hit enter until it exits.

thanks!

A

Hi Aaron,
ALL the output that appears is what I said before:

error: CUPSEXT could not be loaded. Please check HPLIP installation.

thank you.

Does it say what version of HPLIP you are using?

A

No it doesn't.
Right now I'm using version 2.8.2.
Allways "between" installations I did make uninstall, to make sure I uninstalled the previous versions.

Right now, I tried most of the commands "hp-" from the /usr/bin directory and all of them had the same problem as hp-check.

Except hp-toolbox. The output of hp-toolbox is:

HP Linux Imaging and Printing System (ver. 2.8.2)
HP Device Manager ver. 11.0

Copyright (c) 2001-7 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, LP
This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
This is free software, and you are welcome to distribute it
under certain conditions. See COPYING file for more details.

rror: PyQt not installed. GUI not available. Exiting.
warning: Qt/PyQt initialization failed.
error: hp-toolbox requires GUI support. Exiting.

Whic is odd, since PyQt is installed:

rpm -q PyQt => PyQt-3.16-4

...

Please uninstall hplip 2.8.2 and then send me an email directly ke7ezt(at)gmail.com

Also run:

su -c "rm -rf /usr/share/hplip"

I'll send you a file that may work for you. We haven't tested the install on CentOS 5 recently however it should work..but apparently it's not so I'll need to take a look at it.

Aaron

From Julian, and the answer to this question.

Thanks Julian!

A

----

Hi Aaron,

I have two versions of python: python 2.4, which comes installed by default in the centos distribution, and python 2.5, which I installed myself from the tarball. Version 2.4 is installed in /usr (/usr/bin, /usr/lib, etc.). To keep it separate, I installed version 2.5 in /usr/local

Therefore, there were two python commands: /usr/bin/python, which was python2.4 and /usr/local/bin/python, which was python2.5.
Also, there were two sets of library directories, include directories, and so on.

By default, for some reason I cannot figure out yet, typing python runs the /usr/local/bin/python, which is version 2.5 (not the one I used to install hplip). Now, since hp-x commands are actually python scripts, they ammount to running a python shell and importing them, or, else to doing, e.g., "python check.py" in the directory where check.py is intalled. Then, at install time the hplip would use python2.4 and install everything in the correct places for python2.4 to find it. But at runtime it would run "python", which, in my case, was by default python2.5, which, then did not find any of the libraries that were included in the python2.4 directories.

I found a few ways of solving the problem

a) just going to the directory where check.py, setup.py, etc are located and running them using explicitly "/usr/bin/python check.py" (remember in my case /usr/bin/python is the 2.4 version, used for installation of hplip.

b) renaming /usr/local/bin/python to /usr/local/bin/python2.5 and then making a symbolic link: ln -s /usr/bin/python /usr/local/bin, in this way, now when I type python (which is what hp-check, etc, use) the 2.4 version is run, rather than the 2.5 one, which I run using, explicitly python2.5.

I have not figured out yet why the system assumes that "python" is /usr/local/bin/python, rather than /usr/bin/python. There are no environment variables of the shell which define this, or .pythonrc.py file in my home, etc. I thought, may be the system just looks first in /usr/local/bin and only then on /usr/bin when searching the PATH, but even this was not the case: if I just renamed the /usr/local/bin/python to something else, typing "python" would just not work.

To summarize, It is just too complicated. I would say the average user: make sure you DON'T have two python versions on the same system. Actually, I'm thinking of uninstalling version 2.5 and keeping only 2.4 myself.
To a more informed user, which wants two versions of python, you should just warn them that this make mean trouble.

One thing I think is, somethow a "bug" in hplip is that one can give configure, make, etc the option of which is the python command one wants to use, by using environment variables, it uses this for compilation, but it does not modify the check.py, setup.py, etc files so that they too use this command. This is: check.py, etc, assume that one used for the installation of hplip the DEFAULT version of python, which was not my case.

Sorry for the long reply, but It was a rather complicated problem! (however, for what I saw, other people had it as well).

Best regards,

Julian.