Very Important Note on HP LaserJet P1102 on FreeBSD

[Carlos A. M. dos Santos]

On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 8:20 PM, Bahman Kahinpour
<bahman.linux at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi dear FreeBSD people,
> After spending a lot of time on making my HP LaserJet P1102 work on
> FreeBSD, I found out what the problem is!!! Please tell this to
> anybody who has problems with HP P1102 on FreeBSD!
> The problem with this HP model is that it has a fake CD-ROM which
> contains the Windows drivers. The USB must actually be switched from
> the CD-ROM mode to the Printer mode in order to work. Otherwise, the
> printer will not work whatever you do. /dev/ulpt0 will not show up
> either.
> ---> The workaround is this: You must (unfortunately) connect the
> printer to a Windows system and run SIUtility.exe or SIUtility64.exe
> from the UTIL folder in the Driver CD-ROM (physical CD-ROM that comes
> with the printer not the fake one) and completely disable this "HP
> Smart Install" feature. After disabling this feature, everything will
> be fine on FreeBSD and life will be more beautiful.
> * Please pass this info on blogs, wikis, ... . I do not want other
> FreeBSD fans suffer this pain.
> Good luck

First of all, I must make clear that regardless the fact that I work
for HP and have been working on Laserjet printer firmware for more
that five years -- though not on this particular printer model -- I'm
speaking for myself, not for the company.

>From my own experience, you will probably achieve much better results
from HP printers if you choose the network-enabled models (those whose
names have a "n" or "w" suffix), not the host-based ones. This is
especially true regarding printer management, since the net-enabled
printers have an embedded web server. They also support management and
monitoring via SNMP, which is very helpful.