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.
Hi,
Thanks for the information. I’ve been wanting to purchase this all-in-one but I want to confirm that it is possible to scan wirelessly. Your article seems to suggest that it is possible but when I called the HP rep in India, she said the scanning requires the USB connection.
I’m just using a Windows configuration. Not Linux.
If the printer has wireless scanning ability, I’ll almost certainly buy it.
Perhaps you could share your knowledge in this area as you are already and owner (and a techie as well).
I have the C4385 and yes, you can print and scan wirelessly. That thing about having to scan using USB is BS. I did have a problem with the Digital Imaging Monitor on my Windows Vista machine, but works flawlessly on the Ubuntu machine.
Somehow, I don’t think the support team at HP knows anything about networking or wireless for that matter. They were telling me it was a problem with my ISP because it wouldn’t stay connected. What?
While it is already out of production, I as considering buying this printer because it’s what’s one the market here in China and ha a lot of good features and linux compatible with hplip at a reasonable price.
Anyway, is it absolutely necessary to use windows to configure the wireless printing first? Wouldn’t it be possible jsut to get the IP from your router, then use that to http int the printer and configure from there? I hope HP wouldn’t have broken that standard here.
Thanks Prakash!
I was able to use your instructions to reinstall my HP Photosmart C4480 in Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04.
While this is a USB-only printer, it now works better, scans, AND is detectable to my Win XP laptop.
Keep up the good work!
Trent T