Comment 15 for bug 162196

@Aaron, to reproduce the error your locale have to be set to any ISO codepage.
This bug is not bound to any particular distro. It depends on which locale settings the user will choose during distro install. For example for UTF8 or ascii there should be no problem. Look at what codepages the error reporters have on their systems and how changing to other codepage makes hplip working.

The bug exist only on machines which do not use UTF8 or raw ascii codepage/locales.
This happens because new cups can not accept anything except UTF8 (see cups changelog or read this bug report from the top). So before talking with cups API conversion from user codepage to UTF8 have to be done (just use my trick: LC_ALL=$LANG.UTF8 at the beginning execution of hplip tools to auto convert user codepage to UTF8 to make cups happy)

How to reproduce the bug on your system:
aaron@localhost ~ $ locale -a
C
pl_PL
pl_PL.iso88592 ----------------------------
pl_PL.iso8859-2 |
POSIX |
en_GB.iso885915 |
aaron@localhost ~ $ LC_ALL=pl_PL.iso88592 hp-toolbox
(hp-toolbox will run saying there is no printer)
locale -a may return different codepages available on your distro. If you will find any with name *.iso8859* use it as LC_ALL= to trigger on the bug.
If this will be not enough to trigger the bug try this:
export LANG=pl_PL.iso88592
and do it for all locale. When you finish locale should tell this:
aaron@localhost ~ $ locale
LANG=pl_PL.iso88592
LC_CTYPE="pl_PL.iso88592"
LC_NUMERIC="pl_PL.iso88592"
LC_TIME="pl_PL.iso88592"
LC_COLLATE="pl_PL.iso88592"
LC_MONETARY="pl_PL.iso88592"
LC_MESSAGES="pl_PL.iso88592"
LC_PAPER="pl_PL.iso88592"
LC_NAME="pl_PL.iso88592"
LC_ADDRESS="pl_PL.iso88592"
LC_TELEPHONE="pl_PL.iso88592"
LC_MEASUREMENT="pl_PL.iso88592"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="pl_PL.iso88592"
LC_ALL=pl_PL.iso88592

then run hp-toolbox and other HP tools.

If you will still have troubles by reproducing the error, post locale -a output.