Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

I picked up an HP Photosmart 8450 on Woot. I was originally going to install it using USB, but thought better of it and set it up as a networked printer.

First, the CUPS drivers need to be installed:
yum install hplip

Get the PPD file and put it in /usr/share/cups/model. Set the owner and group to root and permissions to u=rw,g=r,o=r. Then run service cups restart.

Next, check the status with hp-makeuri. I got this error:
[ERROR]: Unable to connect to hpiod.

The hplip service doesn’t get started by the RPM installation, though it does get set up on chkconfig. BTW, doing service --status-all will show you hpiod and hpssd are not running. But the service name is hplib, not either of those. So what we need to do to get it going is service hplip start.

So, running hp-makeuri again gave me [ERROR]: You must specify IPs and/or DEVNODEs on the command line.

Adding the IP address of the printer (hp-makeuri 192.168.0.9) worked and gave me CUPS URI: hp:/net/Photosmart_8400_series?ip=192.168.0.9

Next, get the CUPS administration screen in your browser. It’s at http://localhost:631. Select Administration. Under Printers, choose Add Printer. The name can’t have any spaces, so I used hp8450. The location is the IP address, e.g. 192.168.0.9. Lastly enter a text description. I used “HP Photosmart 8450”.

At the device prompt, select IPP. At the Device URI prompt enter the URI from hp-makeuri, hp:/net/Photosmart_8400_series?ip=192.168.0.9. Enter HP for the Make. Select the HP 8400 driver.

Select Printers and print a test page.

I’ve got a SCSI scanner attached to /dev/sg0. Under previous versions of RedHat, I set the group to disk, added read and write permissions for the group and added myself to the group. Since upgrading to a 2.6 kernel which has the UDEV filesystem, every time I reboot, I have to do this over again. Until I found out how to make it stick. These directions are for Ubuntu, but they were close enough. Here’s what I had to do differently for Fedora Core 4:

Fedora doesn’t have /etc/udev/udev.rules, rather a directory called /etc/udev/rules.d. This is specified in the top-level configuration file /etc/udev/udev.conf. On my box, rules.d has one file called 50-udev.rules. I edited this file. On the line you add, I changed the group to disk instead of scanner. Once done, as root, do rmmod sg, then modprobe sg to reload the driver and check your work. One bit of goofiness I saw was that adding the SYMLINK parameter caused my permissions to be ignored. So I left it off. I can live with just /dev/sg0.

Copy TTF file to a directory, say /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF.
Edit /etc/fonts/local.conf and make sure that directory is in a line like this:
<dir>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF</dir>
inside the <fontconfig> section

Restart X and you’re in business.