Comment 30 for bug 813482

Hello! Congratulations--it's a clear and friendly and accessible site; doesn't make a mere user like me feel like an idiot!

I have a confession to make. I remembered that I have a friend with a netbook running Windows. She came for tea, brought her netbook and CD-ROM drive. We browsed the contents of the HP installation disk and found the SIUtility.exe program in the UTILS folder on that disk. We connected her netbook to my printer and ran that program--it runs by itself, doesn't require installation--and when it asked whether we wanted to disable "SMART INSTALL" on the computer or on the printer, we pushed the PRINTER button.

By that time I had made so many changes to various configurations on my Ubuntu installation in search of a non-Windows solution that I decided to make a clean OS install. This time I installed Linux Mint 13 (Cinnamon desktop), as I had originally planned to do when all this misery started. I then installed HPLIP in custom mode and plugged in my printer/scanner, and now it prints and scans effortlessly.

I'm sorry that I didn't have the patience to continue my search for a pure non-Windows solution, but I devoted many hours to the attempt.