Go2Linux | Linux Operating System

HPLIP: Installing HP Printer plugin

If you are installing a HP Printer on Arch Linux, and it is one that needs proprietary plugin, you may have problems while building that plugin.

This is because Arch Linux upgraded python from 2 to 3, so while you are running hp-setup or hp-plugin, if you see this error:

Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing HPLIP 3.10.9 Plugin Self Extracting Archive...
  File "./plugin_install.py", line 78
    except ImportError, e:
                      ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
error: Python gobject/dbus may be not installed

You need to use python 2 to run the script instead of python 3, one easy way to do it is:

* The steps*

1. Delete the /usr/bin/python file which is just a link to /usr/bin/python3
2. Change to /usr/bin folder
3. Create a new link, this time pointing to python 2.7

The commands

rm -rf /usr/bin/python

cd /usr/bin

ln -s /usr/bin/python2.7 python

You’re done.

But I preferred to make just an exception for this time, and create a temporal link, and leave the original one as it is.

The steps

1. Go to /tmp folder
2. Create the link to python2.7
3. Add /tmp to the path
4. Export the new PATH variable

The commands

cd /tmp

link -s /usr/bin/python2.7 python

PATH=/tmp:$PATH

export PATH

Now, you can run all the programs you need to use python2 and then just delete the link in the /tmp folder and you are done.