I've been running Fedora 15 from a Live USB drive, primarily to test Gnome 3, but I've also been wondering how easy it would be to do all the things I need to do on my computer on Fedora 15.
Today I tried to use my printer to print and scan. It's an HP deskjet j610 wireless printer/scanner which I'd previously configured in Debian and now connects to my router. In Debian Squeeze I'd had to manually install the latest version of the HP printer software hplip, because new versions of the software come out regularly to support new printer and Squeeze came with a version in the repositories that was too old to recognise my printer. Fedora 15 has just been released, so I hoped it would come with HP software up-to-date enough to work with my printer.
I managed to print fairly easily. I went to Applications>Other>Printing and my printer was listed as a Network printer. Adding the printer prompted for the download of an HP driver, and after tinstalling the driver, I was able to print a test page.
Scanning was more of a problem. Simple Scan was installed but couldn't see my scanner. I reckoned I would need hplip again, so I installed that [from the Fedora repository, not from HP]. I found I also needed hplip-gui. However, the hplip GUI disn't automatically discover my printer, and I had to add the printer's IP address (look in the router's DHCP Client List or print the report in the wireless section of the printer menu) using Manual Discovery.
After the manual discovery, hplip recognised my printer and I could do a scan in Simple Scan. However, I also found the HP Deskjet 3050 was listed twice in Printers now, so installing and setting hplip might be the best way to set up the printer- hplip can also check ink levels which is useful.
[I did this from a Live USB- in an actual install, I had to enter username root and the root password to add the printer.]
Excelent post, thank you so much
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