HP Photosmart C4388 – Multifunction Device – Printer/Scanner/Copier
Configuring this with wireless printing and scanning Ubuntu Linux 7.10
Whats good about this printer:
Wireless Printing: So your printer/scanner need not to be physically connected to the PC/Laptop and can be anywhere on the Network.
Memory Card Reader: Remove your memory card from your digital camera, insert into the printer and print your photos directly.
LCD Display: It has a nice LCD display which displays the status.
Photo quality: The printer is designed to print photo quality prints, I haven’t compared the quality, but its a nice feature to have 
Flat bed scanner: So you can scan documents and books.
Copier: You can take photocopies without using a computer. Directly like a photocopy machine.
What I don’t like:
Single colour cartridge: No separate cartridge for each colour so you need to replace the whole cartridge even if you run out of one colour. What a waste!
Also be careful when you run the printer for the first time. It takes a test print and asks you to scan the page. If you don’t wait for the ink to dry up, your scanner will have ink smudged all over! Wonder why don’t ask you to wait.
Now the meat:
Note: Please read the section on HPLIP below, before you start.
Configuring the printer on Ubuntu is a breeze. Just plug in the USB cable and the printer gets detected and configured. It uses the C4200 drivers which work fine.
To configure wireless, you need to run the setup utility the first time on Windows. This will activate the wireless printing.
Once that is done, from Linux, change the print port from USB to jetdirect and give the IP address. The printer IP address can be found through the router. Once you know the IP, just ping to check if its accessible.
If you can’t figure out the IP, you can force your router to assign a specific IP address to the MAC address and then use that IP address.
If I look into /etc/cups/printers.conf this is what I see:
DeviceURI hp:/net/Photosmart_C4380_series?ip=192.168.0.11
Where 192.168.0.11 is the Printer IP address.
HPLIP
To get the scanner working. I had to install the HP utility from HPLIP Site. This was a bit tricky to install. When it was trying to install the necessary packages, it gave me some strange errors.
Package install command failed with error: 100
To fix that I had to manually install the required packages and then it worked fine.
This utility also doesn’t work with the drivers bundled with Ubuntu and those drivers needs to be uninstalled.
Once this was installed, I was able to print and scan wirelessly!
To scan use xsane or xscanimage
Also refer to this article for more information.
