The hp-plugin hp-setup and hp-check commands are built along with the HP Device Manager gui from the hplip source

When I look at hplip Release notes I see support for Linux Mint 19.3 wasn't officially added until version 3.20.3 which only came out January 27 earlier this year. I do not see that Ubuntu 20.04 is supported but the hplip-gui hplip-data and hplip applications seem to work even though hp-check reports a lot of errors.

The hplip-gui package of Ubuntu contains the GUI which appears as "HP Toolbox" on the menus. By default it appears to be integrated with the simple-scan package which is an alternate front end to the sane package that xsane also uses.

I just upgraded four machines to Linux Mint 20 and had an issue with hplip-toolbox and hp-plugin on ak19 and no issue on the other machines. I had previously had an issue with scanning on that machine and had installed hplip from source which resolved the problem with the alternate xsane GUI and HP Device Manager.

I was able to install hplip 3.20.6 from source on Linux Mint 20

This is the latest version as of July 2020 but the source is not yet ready for Linux Mint 20 or Ubuntu 20.04.

The Manual Build and Install Instructions for both Linux Mint and Ubuntu at the HP's Developer Portal install with a /usr prefix which is wrong from what I know about installing software. I used /usr/local as the prefix because I am installing from source. This is based on the general guidance about bin:

  • /usr/local/bin is for normal user programs not managed by the distribution package manager, e.g. locally compiled packages. You should not install locally compiled packages into /usr/bin because future distribution upgrades may modify or delete them without warning.

A lot of "./configure" steps

I ran a lot of the "./configure" steps to resolve dependencies. The options I used ended up being: 

./configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-hpppddir=/usr/share/ppd/HP \
--libdir=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu --enable-qt5 --enable-hpcups-install \
--enable-cups-drv-install --disable-cups-ppd-install --disable-hpijs-install \
--disable-foomatic-drv-install --disable-foomatic-ppd-install \
--disable-foomatic-rip-hplip-install --enable-fax-build --enable-dbus-build \
--enable-network-build --enable-scan-build --disable-policykit \
--disable-libusb01_build --disable-udev_sysfs_rules --enable-doc-build

Much is from the HP's Developer Portal install instructions except I use the -prefix=/usr/local and --enable-qt5 options. I discussed the prefix above and I found the --enable-qt5 option when reviwing the "./configure --help" output. I used only the default Linux Mint 20 repositories which includes the upstream Ubuntu 20.04 repositories. Usually if it is a good configure like the one for the hplip software, missing required dependencies result in a message at the end of the compile process like:

  • configure: error: "cannot find <package> support"

This particular process is more complicated because the hplip package is not ready for the Ubuntu 20.04 base and the package names do not match available packages.

python-dev-is-python3 resolves the "cannot find python-devel support" config error

The following produces a lot of output and when looking for python-devel which is not available. 

apt-cache search python | grep dev

I don't remember the entire sequence of packages I installed in my attempt to resolve all the configure errors but I remember python-dev-is-python3 solved the last one.

You must remove python-minimal before attempting to install python-is-python3 and python-dev-is-python3 

sudo apt-get remove python-minimal

At one point python-is-python2 was installed along with another package and should be removed before python-dev-is-python3 is installed. 

sudo apt-get remove python-is-python2

sudo apt-get install python-dev-is-python3 python-is-python3

Continue with "make" "make install" steps

Once the configure step completes normally the "make" and "make install" complete normally. 

make
sudo make install

The hplip package includes the hp-check utility

The output of the hp-check utility includes a summary of Missing Required and Optional Dependencies. I was able to remove all but the python3-pyqt4 Required and python3-dbus.mainloop.qt Optional Dependencies and with --enable-qt5 specified in the configure step this does not prevent the hp-plugin from working for me when the one provided in the default Ubuntu 20.04 repositories did not.

Once additional dependencies are installed restart the build process from the configure step.

This post is not complete install instructions

Sometimes I stop when the problem is resolved and sometimes I try to document how I solved the problem. The hplip software has been around a while and has installation instructions for a lot of Linux distributions including Linux Mint and Ubuntu. The developers that maintain hplip are not yet supporting the latest versions of Linux Mint and Ubuntu but the version in the Ubuntu repositories seem to work for most people. I could not find documentation on a build for Ubuntu 20.04 but was able to succeed for my purposes.

It's actually been a few days since I first resolved my problem and it was a problem with the upgrade of one of my machines that I commented on in the "How to upgrade to Linux Mint 20" post.

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