HP Printer meets AntiX Linux

oK LET ME BE CLEAR. i REALLY DON’T HAVE ANY IDEA WHY ALL THESE STEPS WORK. They worked for me so here they are.

Also, Don’t be foolish. Ensure your printer’s USB cable is pulgged in to the computer before doing this. Or else the HP printer option won’t show up. Even if it does it will be something faulty which won’t show up.

Acknowledgements

CUPS and HPLIP are what we are after here. CUPS Common Unix Printing Standard

Getting CUPS

Type in the terminal

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cups
sudo apt-get install cups-browsed
sudo apt-get install cups-filters
sudo service cups start

after which you should be able to login in browser using

http://localhost:631

HPLIP

It would probably be better to install HPLIP also while we are at it as no harm done. I don’t think so the system made any use of it but I may be mistaken. As in Install HP Printer drivers in Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and elementary OS : FossLinux we

check if we already have HPLIP via dpkg -l hplip not there
decided not to install HPLIP from Get HPLIP as we have no idea of the COMPATIBILITY with our system or the distribution
decided to go with

` sudo apt update`

sudo apt upgrade

sudo apt install hplip hplip-gui

as we felt it would be more compatible with our system

An aside

AntiX is not a systemd distro. So, systemctl won’t work in it. So tutorials such as Installing Printers in Linux | CUPS, Printing, and Scanning - YouTube : Chris Titus won’t work off the bat. We need to improvise. So we looked at How to Fix “Systemctl Command Not Found” Error in Linux There we got the idea of replacing systemctl with service. So we have sudo service cups start instead of sudo systemctl enable cups and sudo systemctl start cups

Continuing further

We have this page for CUPS We then click on the highlighted area This leads us to If you read throughly through this you may be able to do every thing by the command line. But at least I am not so pedantic. Just click on the portion encircled in red ink We will get the following. Click on the Add printer This goes to what we see below. Select the printer as below. If it is not present try reconnecting the printer and praying to god. Hopefully you are lucky and just follow the on screen instruction here on.