Today, we bought a new all-in-one device for home use, a HP Deskjet 3050A J611 series, that was told to be capable for WiFi connections. The delivered software on a CD is available for Windows and Mac OS machines only. Now I run Ubuntu which shall not be a problem as all HP devices are supported by default on this operating system.
And right: I got it working very simply. Connect the USB cable and the driver will be installed even without a click, just use it.
Connecting the printer to your router brings up some more problems. Usually, if you have network-compatible hardware, you can adjust at least a network configuration on it. Not so on the printer we bought: by default, it uses WPS, the so called “Wireless Protection Setup” where you have to enter a PIN to your router. Of course, it doesn’t work if your router software doesn’t support WPS for a good reason: WPS was cracked via brute force attacks a while ago, just wondering why hardware with this software flaw is still delivered by HP…
Anyway, I found a workaround:
I couldn’t bring up running the HP software setup via wine what actually was a good thing: HP doesn’t only bring the drivers but also a lot of bloatware with it onto your machine.
So I fired up my (for emergency cases) still existing Windows installation and went to the entire setup process of the all-in-one device “drivers”. Interestingly, the setup routine asked me if I wanted to use the device via my WiFi network and I agreed. (Sorry that the Windows screen shots are in German.)
During the next steps, the WiFi configuration was read out and wrote to the device configuration (WTF?). But from this point on, the new device was connected to my home WiFi and got a proper IP address.
Once you finished the installation successfully you can completely delete the HP software from your machine. Start over to Ubuntu again and install a network printer with the given IP address that you can find even on the display of your all-in-one device now.
Printing with CUPS via WiFi works smooth for all Ubuntu machines now. Alone I couldn’t get running the scanner via WiFi but actually I can live with that 😉
Anon
Thanks for a wonderfully detailed workaround for this problem. I hope that you also contacted HP and complained. Unless people do this, preferably many people, it’s unlikely HP will see this as an issue they need to address with future printers.
Marco Steinhäuser
Yep, you’re right, I’ll get in touch with them. Thanks for your comment.
Marco Steinhäuser
Hi again, I chose HP Germany’s Facebook page to let them know. Seems like the customer service works very professional here, so there’s maybe a good chance to get that issue sorted.
https://www.facebook.com/HPDeutschland/posts/10151442193535855