OK, I think I've got it licked. the dj2540 being alarmingly cheap was never intended for use over the usb. After hp-setup has run it does not even advertise itself as present. After a reboot, lsusb does not show up the printer. The usb connection is only there for the setup program.
Did some wholesale surgery deleting cups, hplip and a shedful of stuff. I'd thought that hpijs and cups would have given me usb printing. It did not. Cups could not find any printers on the usb even though it was listed in lsusb. There was no way to install it as a usb printer _and have it _work. What was confusing was that hp-setup said in was configured as hp:/usb/... whereas in fact it ends configured as hp:/net/... HP even say, somewhere, it is best to remove the usb cable after set up. Scanning was cured once I installed the correct version of sane-backends, i.e. sane-backends-1.0.24-snmp. hp-makeuri had to be run with the usb cable unplugged to give the scanner device name for scanimage to work $ hp-makeuri -s 192.168.0.3 hpaio:/net/Deskjet_2540_series?ip=192.168.0.3 It did mean having to start inetd and saned also. Hmmm. Ok I'll live with it for now. dj2540 natively uses PCL3gui so it does not understand postscript. Still, the print quality is good. Thanks Moss
