Printing to a machine on the network problem?

[Gooserider]

I am working on setting up a Gentoo box for my GF, and have almost everything working, except for printing.

The printer is an HP PSC-500 multi-function inkjet / scanner attached to the parallel port on another Gentoo box on the network. It works fine on that box, and other machines on the network can print from it. According to the KDE print manager, it is running on the "HP PSC500 Foomatic/hpijs, hpijs 2.8.7.3" driver, and emerge says I have net-print/hplip 2.8.7 installed. It is using CUPS, which I have configured to be available to the local network, and other machines print to it without problems. I actually have it set up as several "virtual" printers with different configurations, i.e. color, grayscale, 2-up, etc...

The machine I'm setting up has hplip 3.9.4b-r1 installed, but hp-setup won't find the printer. Initially it would insist on only looking at the USB bus and crash out when it didn't find anything, but I did a reinstall with "USE=cupsddk dbus fax gtk parport ppds qt3 qt4 scanner snmp -doc -minimal -policykit" and it now will give me the option to search the network, but it still doesn't find anything.

OTOH, if I use the KDE printer setup, and tell it to look at the other machine, it immediately sees the printer, in all it's virtual modes, but still wants me to pick a driver - of the available drivers, a test print fails to get a response from the printer, except for the PCL 3 driver, which works, but only at 300x300 resolution (the printer is supposed to do 600x600)

What do I need to do to make this thing work?

Gooserider
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Box 1: P2 Celeron 400, 320mb RAM, 80GB HD, Cirrus Logic 4614/22/24 sound card, ATI 3D RAGE PRO AGP 1X/2X (sound & video onboard)
Box 2: AMD Athlon 2500+ 512mb RAM, 80GB HD, Gigabyte K7 Triton (Nvidia) mobo, GeForce2 video

[MotivatedTea]

After installing hplip, you need to restart CUPS in order for the new drivers to be seen. hp-setup won't see your printer because it's not actually connected to the computer you're running it on. KDE's print setup is basically a front-end to the CUPS system, which you can also access by opening a web browser to http://localhost:631. The default CUPS setup broadcasts available printers, which is how CUPS (and the KDE print setup) is able to see the printer on the other machine automatically. You can also access it manually by installing it as an IPP printer at the address ipp://machine/printername, where "machine" is the IP address of your other computer and "printername" is the name of the printer. Alternatively, http://machine:631/printername.

I have hplip installed, although I don't have your model of printer. According to the OpenPrinting Database http://www.openprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=HP-PSC_500 (Edit: fixed URL.), the only driver that will give you the full 600 dpi for your printer is the HPLIP one. The ppd file should be installed on your computer at "/usr/share/ppd/HP/hp-psc_500-hpijs.ppd.gz". Since I have hplip, I do have that file on my computer. But that driver doesn't show up in CUPS! (If you gunzip the file and view it in a text editor, you'll see that it should appear as ""HP PSC 500 Foomatic/hpijs".) I found the following entry in my cups error log (/var/log/cups/error_log):

[MotivatedTea]

I looked into this a little more. This is probably an even easier way to fix your problem. Simply upgrade to the latest hplip. net-print/hplip-3.9.4b-r1 seems to have fixed the .ppd problem. It's currently testing keyworded (~x86, etc.). I installed it, and now "HP PSC 500 hpijs, 3.9.4b.10 (en)" is listed as a driver. That driver is made by HP, and it theoretically should support all the resolutions of your printer.