Ubuntu 8 and HP Deskjet F4280

My mother passed away recently bequeathed me a large number of old photos. I wish to save these treasures from the ravages of time and share them with others easily. Scanning them is the obvious solution but I"m afraid to use my old HP OfficeJeet K80 for the task. It has a scanner but you load the original like a FAX machine and I'm afraid this would damage the photos so I purchased a brand new HP DeskJet F4280 for the task. I got home with my new technological goody and prepared to scan away.

Note: I love Linux. Its a great operating system that takes a lot less system resources than Windows but there are times I just want to plug in my new piece of hardware and have it work. I you are that sort of person Linux is not necessarily for you.

I plugged the new device into my old home built computer and got an error. It simply would do a thing with it. So, I booted up my old laptop, discovered I had a bad disk drive, installed a new disk drive (we all have a spare laying around, right?), installed Ubuntu 8 on it and tried it. Same problem. Damn!

So, I hit the forums. The problem seemed to be that HP devices are controlled by something called HPLIP. HP decided to sidestep creating a new driver for everything that came out developed a single package which controlled all the HP devices attached to the various flavors of Linux.

The forum gurus stated I needed to upgrade to the latest version of this software if I had any hopes of getting the device working. But, as with everything involving Linux, it just wasn't that simple. I was running hplip 2.8.8 and needed hplip 2.8.10

I downloaded a run file named hplip-2.8.10.run from http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/install/install/index.html . Its simply a run file you execute by typing
sh hplip-2.8.10.run

Well, it almost worked. The thing hung up on the first step and would not go any further. I let the thing sit for an hour and still nothing.

I had tried to install Java docs earlier and for some reaons the java docs caused every install to hang afterwards. I'm still not sure why so I went to symantec package manager and unstalled java docs (although it never fully installed) and, for good measure, the existing hplip install.

After that, it installed fine and I saw the new print drivers in my printer setup window.

So now I can scan beauties like this

I can't believe I ever looked that young.