Add printer wizard doesn't work

[Iskendar]

Hi all.

Did a full reinstall of gutsy recently, and now the printer (HP 2605dn on the lan) doesn't work anymore.
Removed it and tried to reinstall with the Add Printer Wizard, but when I get to the "Printer Model Selection" step, the list of manufacturers and models is empty. Any ideas on what's the problem: some missing package maybe. The HPLIP package is installed, fwiw.

[Detonate]

Re: Add printer wizard doesn't work

Have you tried to install it using the cups interface? Enter http://localhost:631 in a browser window and see if the cups interface comes up. If not, you may need to reinstall cups.

[Iskendar]

Re: Add printer wizard doesn't work

Yup, I did manage to reinstall using the CUPS webinterface. It's just that the wizard used to work, and it doesn't anymore. People use Ubuntu because it has a reputation that it just works, but in this case it doesn't. Either the driver database wasn't installed with the rest, or somehow the kde interface doesn't know where to find it. Maybe I should file this as a bugreport, but I wanted to check first if it could've been something I've done wrong.

So now I do have a printer which manages to print a test page. Meanwhile, this infuriating problem remains: any time I try to print something with kpdf or openoffice, the printer tries to print in the letter format, where it should print A4. I changed the papersize everywhere (I think): the locale in kde regional settings, the kde printersettings, the kpdf printer dialog, the openoffice printer dialog, the CUPS webinterface, the printer's own webinterface, even in /etc/papersize (which was unchanged from the default letter after all that!) to no avail. A windows laptop has no problems, so it's probably not the hardware.

[Iskendar]

Re: Add printer wizard doesn't work

Ok, I found a (hopelessly contrived) solution for the openoffice problem: regardless of any system or printer settings, openoffice uses the papersize of its default template. So the solution is: open a new file, change papersize in Format->Page, save as template, and set as new default template (wtf)
http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=802

So I guess the kpdf problem arises also from the original papersize set in the pdf files. Now it's a mystery to me why the printer system doesn't override this setting when printing, there used to be no problem with that. Problem is that unlike openoffice, kpdf can't change the file's papersize, so I'm stuck with acroread for letter pdf files. Any suggestions.