MEPIS Community Forum

I have a Dell Latitude E6510 & my daughter has a Dell Latitude D430. Both have Mepis 11 installed. Mine was a clean install and her's was an install preserving /home from Mepis 8. We have a wired network HP all-in-one (Officejet Pro 8500). I can install it using the HP Device manager GUI and print and scan to/from it. She cannot install it using the HP Device manager. Using Device Setup the printer is found, but when next is clicked she gets "Unable to communicate with the device. Please check the device and try again." With the two laptops sitting side by side and at the same time I can print or scan. We have the same hplip related packages of the same version installed. Our groups are the same. I tried setting up the device using Cups browser method & supplying the connection information identical to what is on my laptop. When I opened HP Divice Manage the printer was there, but there was no scanner icon and it reported another communication error. I have deleted .hplip in "home" and uninstalled 8 hplip related packages and reinstalled them. All with no change in result. Could this be a firewall problem? But it does not appear that Mepis 11 has a default firewall and she has not added one and I have not removed one.

Have you tried deleting the .kde folder (or at least rename it)? Could it be something to do with the old kde printer settings (3.5) vs. 4.x? Warning: she will have to re-setup all her kde (and related) settings. Just a thought.

Good suggestion. Re-using the SM 8.0 /home on a SM 11.0 installation is just asking for trouble IMO. I'd wager a cup of coffee that your daughter's problems stem from doing that.

You might try entering http://localhost:631 in a browser to get into the CUPS Home page and then use the Add Printer feature. Sometimes that works better than the HPLIP application.

Thanks for the reply, joany. I was trying to say I did that.

That is what got me to thinking this might be something other than a printer problem.

benny_fletch, thanks for the thought on the .kde folder. I may try renaming it. I agree on the whole "bad idea to preserve home" idea. I usually move e-mail and other data to another partition and link back to home. Then I do a clean install. But I had a hard time talking her into letting me update to Mepis 11 before she left for school and that was an attempt to disrupt as little as possible. She was not wild about learning KDE 4.

may also be a permissions issue. if the install somehow got mucked up because of preserving home then the proper group additions may not have been made.

there should be an lp (that's a lowercase L) group that has as its members, hplip, lp, and any normal user. could be that her userid isn't part of the lp group. also, if you're checking this group check lpadmin and make sure her userid is listed there too.

you can do this via kuser. goto to the start menu > System > kuser

I would do a quick back up and do a clean install. I had the same problems going from 8.5 to 11. Did the backup and clean install in the end.

For as long as it is going to take, everyone will be much happier. Probably would be up and running in 30-60 minutes, depending on how much is in the /home to be backed up.

Thanks for the suggestion, GoManutd. Tonight I will look at that.

smilliken, I know you are right, but I am not sure she will be excited about that option. It is better than chasing our tails. I thought I would check here before going that far. That will be my Monday (day off) project.