How to make HP Laserjet 1000 work on Ubuntu 20.04

Pre-reading notes: I’ve had ‘mixed results’ even with my own blog here on different ubuntu machines. Some seem to ‘just work’ these days after plugging in and running the built in installer, others seem to require this blog. Hopefully one of them will work for you! Let’s continue…

If you ever read my first blog on this same topic, this is a sequel. It seems that with each LTS of ubuntu I have to find a new work around to keep this old beast printer going, ha.

Big thanks to this blog for the solution. Big thanks to one commentator at the bottom who summarized it.

Assuming you do not use Python much, this is the work around solution until HP fixes this python bug. If you are interested in learning more about the bug and why it happens, read the blog above. If you don’t code or use python much, just following these steps should get your printer working.

1. Download latest HP Setup thing: https://sourceforge.net/projects/hplip/files/latest/download
2. Install the ‘trick’ that forces ubuntu to use python 3 instead of 2 (or something like that): sudo apt install python-is-python3
3. Navigate to your Download directory (or wherever you downloaded the HP thing above): cd ~/Downloads
4. change the permissions of the HP thingyso that it can be executed: sudo chmod u+x hplip-3.16.7.run

NOTE: make sure you don’t just blindly copy my filename there because the version might change with time. Make it match your actual file, of course

5. run the same file with ./hplip-3.16.7.run where the./` makes it run. I got some weird errors on this talking about python issues but it ‘seemed’ like it still worked.
6. run the hp-setup with hp-setup command.

In my case I always use USB plug / cable to avoid further headaches.

Next, next, next,

In this case I got the GUI page for the “Driver Plug-in INstallation’

it ran and returned a lot of python errors and seemed not to continue install. This lead me to believe I can’t avoid the python trick above.

On one computer it went veryeasily and well and on another it got stuck on the hp-plugin part where you are asked to install the latest Driver Plug-in Installation stuff.

I tried everything,

in this case it seems like i had a previous attempted install of hplip so what I did was went into that directory and ran: sudo python3 unistall.py and ran that process first

then i went to beginning of this and tried again

no go
then i tried sudo apt remove hplip

then i tried again

./hplip-3.16.7.run

no go

then i tried:

sudo apt install hplip again

sudo apt remove hplip --purge

next in further desperation i went to software centre and discovered hplip-printer-app in there… installing and trying…

oh my oh my! it worked!

my new go-to way is this if you didn’t already suffer everything above:

1. open software center
2. search ‘hplip’
3. install hplip-printer-app from ‘Open Printing’ group
4. in your browser (firefox if default ubuntu) go to http://localhost:8000
5. Click ‘add printer’
6. Give it a name (I did ‘hplaserjet_1000’)
7. Finish off the install
8. Go to something and print a low risk test page to the laserjet.

Hope that helps! Seems to immediately overcome the python issues too.. but I”m not sure because I had already run ‘python-is-python3’ command above.