howto: Add HP M1132 MFP as Printer in Archlinux

by kiawin

It is unfortunate that there are quite a number of printers which aren’t well supported in most OSes (Linux, Windows, MacOS) without specific proprietary printer driver from the manufacturer.

However, with Google on hand and great resources from avid linuxers, we have a good solution for HP M1132 MFP.


1. Install foo2zjs via aur. Not available in the official arch repository though. For me, I uses yaourt instead of installing tarball via PKGBUILD from AUR.

# yaourt -S foo2zjs

2. Install HP Printer Driver (hplip), available in the extra arch repository.

# sudo pacman -S hplip

3. Install printer related packages from official arch repository.

# sudo pacman -S cups cups-filters

4. (Hack: valid for all linuxes using python 3 as base) Re-symlink /usr/bin/python

# sudo rm -f /usr/bin/python
# sudo ln -s /usr/bin/python2 /usr/bin/python

5. Setup HP Printer, and ensure your printer is switched on and connected to your computer via USB. Please take note the handle -i is important

# sudo hp-setup -i

6. Select USB as your connection.

7. Agree to install HP plugins

8. Follow the remaining steps in providing printer name, description and information.

9. You may manage your printer via cups @ http://localhost:631

10. (Hack) Revert the symlink for /usr/bin/python

# sudo rm -f /usr/bin/python
# sudo ln -s /usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/python

Please take note without the hack likely you will get an error message like this:

Uncompressing HPLIP 3.11.12 Plugin Self Extracting Archive…………………………………..
File “./plugin_install.py”, line 78
except ImportError, e:
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
error: Python gobject/dbus may be not installed

Happy printing!