Printer connection in propsheet is wrong

what do you call "print manager"? what is the difference between a detected and
a specified printer?

The package is "gnome-cups-manager" (as listed in the bug report header).

Say an HP-PSC-1210 printer is connected via USB.

Doubleclicking on "New Printer" displays the "add a printer" dialog. There is
a section on that dialog with a radio control, that says "use a detected
printer". The HP-PSC-1210 printer is detected and displayed in this section.
However, using this printer won't work, as the device is owned by PTAL. PTAL
needs to be used if a user wishes to use the scanning function of the device
(installed via "apt-get install hpoj"). PTAL is the opensource/free userspace
driver implemented by HP for their line of printer/scanner/copier (PSC) products.

The device is also listed in the drop-down list beside "Use another printer by
specifying a port", as
"PTAL mlc:usb:psc_1200_series" and it is this device that must be used.

So the printer is listed twice in the Add Printer dialog, but only the second
much more hidden entry is correct and usable.

hpoj is soon to be deprecated in favor of hplip; does hplip work better for you?

Created an attachment (id=2813)
Gnome Printer dialog using hplip

No, it's even more confusing.

As before, nothing is the print system recommends the installation of the hplip package.
Installing the package requires some dependencies from sarge to proceed.

Now in the dialog, I get the dialog as in the attached file, with several entries only one of
which is correct. The others appear to work, but then scanning breaks, or the printer
mysteriously stops working, etc.

Matthias, since I don't have any printer right now, can you please test this
with hplip?

(In reply to comment #6)
> Matthias, since I don't have any printer right now, can you please test this
> with hplip?

I can't test this myself, setting to NEEDINFO.

Matthias, I did not get a quick answer, so I reassign this to you since you
kindly agreed to deal with hplip. :-)

Martin, I can't test a HP-PSC-1210. All I can say is that printing and scanning
of an HP OfficeJet 6110 works fine with hplip 0.9.5 (which is in main) on i386
and amd64.

The problem isn't whether the driver (hplip) works or not, it does work.

The problem is (see attached picture) that the "add printer" dialog is confusing, with multiple entries for a single
physical printer, only one of which works properly -- and that one is in the "port" selection, not in the "auto-detected"
section.

Gianni,

The multiple detected printers problem you indicated regarding gnome-cups-manager with hplip is still present on Ubuntu 6.06 LTS.

Do you agree we can close this bug as a duplicate of bug #32302. Although it is more recent, that bug only describes hplip and not hpoj (which is deprecated).

Regards,
Pascal

Can someone please try this on current Edgy and check whether the problem persists? Edgy saw a lot of printing cleanups and bug fixes.

Your bug lacks information we would need to investigate further. We
are now going to close the bug - please reopen if you have more
information at hand.