I see four ways of installing/configuring HP printers and, in no particular order, they are:
I’ve installed and configured my HP Officejet 8000 and it’s working properly but I’d like to know what the preferred method of installing HP printers is, as I’ve always found it very confusing to have numerous ways of doing it, thanks.
Any of those are fine, the manjaro-printer meta package installs system-config-printer, kdeutils-print-manager was installed with KDE, Hplip of-course has it’s own GUI and Cups comes with the web interface, You can always remove system-config-printer and/or kdeutils-print-manager safely, but having them doesn’t hurt anything.
PS, Personally for HP printers I would recommend using the hplip drivers and GUI utils, they typically give more information and control than the others.
Yes, I’ve always preferred HP Device Manager over the others because, as you quite rightly say, it has more to offer and I’ve always found it the easiest to use.
This should actually be: Kicker → Settings → System Settings → Printers
Bearing in mind that my printer is working properly, I’ve found a problem with the above method:
If I change any of the settings of my already installed printer, I cannot save the changes because the username/password dialogue that pops up won’t accept input from the keyboard. Just thought I’d mention this as it may be a bug.
Yep, your right that seems to be a bug.
Just out of interest, I fired up “Standard” and tried changing a few settings and I was able to apply them without any problems. In fact, the username/password dialogue box didn’t appear at all.
Yes, On Ubuntu the root account is disabled on the system and user accounts are set up as administrators. Manjaro is set up like more traditional systems, there is a root account and user accounts are set up as as standard users by default and not administrators. Also the version on Hplip under Ubuntu is slightly older than the one in Manjaro. You could also just be missing an optional dependency that you need might, here is the dependency list for hplip:
Depends On
python2 ghostscript>=8.64-6 foomatic-db foomatic-db-engine net-snmp>=5.7.1 wget
Optional Deps
cups: for printing support
python2-dbus: for dbus support
sane: for scanner support
python2-pillow: for commandline scanning support
python2-notify: for Desktop notification support
python2-reportlab: for pdf output in hp-scan
rpcbind: for network support
python2-pyqt4: for running GUI and hp-toolbox
python2-gobject2: for running hp-toolbox
hplip-plugin: binary blobs for specific devices (AUR) or run hp-setup to download the plugin
libusb: for advanced usb support