It appears that in both xenial and trusty the hpcups ppds do not work for some models (e.g. officejet j4500 series which uses deskjet 6500c as cups model type).
On trusty hpijs ppd does work, but the hpcups ppd fails. Based on comparing the ppds, it appears that there is a difference in what the manufacturer/model name passed in the gs command line looks like. This is consistent with the web search results mentioning ghostscript as the one complaining about the device (i.e. at debug level the cups logs show ghostscript failing to open bbox, but that's probably the wrong device due to an error in command line that ends up getting used). I will attempt to reproduce on a system from which I can pull the logs. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to cups in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1571511 Title: hpcups ppd fails to print; hpijs ppd works (hplip printer) Status in cups package in Ubuntu: New Status in hplip package in Ubuntu: New Bug description: The hplip in xenial is not compatible with the versions of cups and dbus (and various other libraries) in xenial. The initial symptoms were that after running hp-setup -i (text mode only box), and attempting to print a test page from hplip, there was no output. After cancelling that job from http://<host>:631/... and attempting to print another test page from the CUPS interface, CUPS reporter 'filter failed'. Reviewing error_log revealed the message 'unable to open inital device. quitting'. While this *sounds* like a device error, hp-levels and hp-clean both work, so clearly the issue is not with access to the usb device (and the appropriate /dev/bus/usb/*/* device has group lp and group rw permissions). Also some web searching reveals that this can be caused by e.g. ghostscript errors and is not necessarily indicative of an hardware device access issue. Running hp-doctor gives the attached result hplip version 3.16.3+repack0-1 cups 2.1.3-4 dbus 1.10.6-1ubuntu3 On an up-to-date as of 2016-04-18 01:00:00 -0400 Xenial system installed from final beta alternate CD. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cups/+bug/1571511/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
