hp deskjet 5150

Alain De Vos · Feb 7, 2026

Indeed. Mine is Brother MFC. No drivers on FreeBSD or many Linux distro's. Must do some tests sending directly to lp. It works with a toner.

scottro · Feb 7, 2026

My Brother MFC (laser) works without any Brother drivers. I use the everywhere driver--not only on FreeBSD but also tested on several Linux distributions.

fernandel · Feb 9, 2026

balanga said:
Someone gave me an old hp deskjet 5150. How would I go about finding out if I can do anything useful with it from FreeBSD?

I have more than 20 years old Hp business Inkjet 3000 and I have installed cups and hplip and hplip plugins. Long time I am using USB connection but also long time I had network connection.
First cupsd must run and than open hplip manager and try to install.

sko · Feb 9, 2026

Alain De Vos said:
Indeed. Mine is Brother MFC. No drivers on FreeBSD or many Linux distro's. Must do some tests sending directly to lp. It works with a toner.

if it isn't supported by print/brlaser just use the generic hp laserjet PCL driver. I'm printing on various MFCs here @work via the hp emulation.

balanga · 2026-02-16T15:00:22+0000

Is there any way to tell if CUPS can actually see my printer?

The printer is connected by a USB cable.

Bus /dev/usb Device /dev/ugen1.3: ID 03f0:6204 HP, Inc DeskJet 5150c

fernandel · 2026-02-16T15:11:57+0000

balanga said:
Is there any way to tell if CUPS can actually see my printer?

The printer is connected by a USB cable.

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/cups/

scottro · 2026-02-16T16:24:10+0000

It should show in the cups web page. From the link fernandel gave

Adding a printer is generally as easy as clicking "Add Printer" at the Administration screen of the CUPS web interface, or clicking one of the "New Printers Found" buttons also at the Administration screen.When presented with the "Device" drop-down box, simply select the desired locally-attached printer, and then continue through the process.If one has added the print/gutenprint-cups or print/hplip ports or packages as referenced above, then additional print drivers will be available in the subsequent screens that might provide more stability or features.

atax1a · 2026-02-16T16:53:53+0000

balanga said:
Is there any way to tell if CUPS can actually see my printer?

The printer is connected by a USB cable.

it is unclear to us as to what steps you have actually taken to investigate this issue. have you opened the web interface? have you looked at logs?

stop asking context-free questions and instead say what you have tried, what responses you got, and what you expected to happen instead.

balanga · 2026-02-16T20:00:59+0000

atax1a said:
we were mistaken on hpijs — thats the old'n'busted. the new hotness is hplip

pkg install cups hplip ought to get you somewhere. CUPS is pretty well documented too: https://www.cups.org/documentation.html

Not much there is there?

I'm still no wiser.

I can't yet tell if I need a specific driver for the hpdeskjet 5150 and if so what is it called and where to get it from.

atax1a · 2026-02-16T20:02:21+0000

balanga said:
Not much there is there?

I'm still no wiser.

I can't yet tell if I need a specific driver for the hpdeskjet 5150 and if so what is it called and where to get it from.

can you respond to any of the questions we have posed? have you opened the CUPS web interface? what happens when you do that?

balanga · 2026-02-16T20:02:56+0000

atax1a said:
It's probably supported by CUPS, and you'll probably need the HPIJS driver.

probably and probably.... hmmm...

atax1a · 2026-02-16T20:04:35+0000

balanga said:
probably and probably.... hmmm...

you already quoted where we correct ourselves and say to use hplip. for the nth time, what steps have you taken to interact with CUPS?

balanga · 2026-02-16T20:10:28+0000

atax1a said:
can you respond to any of the questions we have posed? have you opened the CUPS web interface? what happens when you do that?

I have opened it and have a mass of information.

I can run lpadmin -p printername but have no idea if that has done anything.

I can't tell if I need a specific printer driver and if so what is it called and where would I get it.

atax1a · 2026-02-16T20:13:39+0000

balanga said:
I have opened it and have a mass of information.

I can run lpadmin -p printername but have no idea if that has done anything.

I can't tell if I need a specific printer driver and if so what is it called and where would I get it.

can you post any of this information, so other people can see it? we cannot see your screen from here.

have you installed hplip? that is the modern HP inkjet stack. Then, you should be able to delete whatever you have configured from the cups UI, add a new printer, and it should largely autodetect. If it does not, show us what happened.

balanga · 2026-02-16T20:14:52+0000

atax1a said:
you already quoted where we correct ourselves and say to use hplip. for the nth time, what steps have you taken to interact with CUPS?

I have attached a cable, run usbconfig to see if my computer sees the printer, and installed cups.

Also added these statements to/etc/rc.conf:-

cupsd_enable="YES"
devfs_system_ruleset="system"

atax1a · 2026-02-16T20:21:16+0000

install hplip, delete the existing printer from the CUPS UI, and then show us, step by step, what you're doing to add a printer.

scottro · 2026-02-16T20:22:20+0000

What is the result of lpstat -p? That should list any available printers.
For example, I have one printer, which I call BrotherMFC. If I run cupsd, and the printer is not on, I get

Code:

printer BrotherMFC is idle.  enabled since Tue Feb 10 13:14:43 2026

If I turn on the printer I get the same thing. So, it basically tells me that I have an enabled printer that is idle.

But it lets me know I have a configured printer.

balanga · 2026-02-16T20:24:33+0000

atax1a said:
can you post any of this information, so other people can see it? we cannot see your screen from here.

have you installed hplip? that is the modern HP inkjet stack. Then, you should be able to delete whatever you have configured from the cups UI, add a new printer, and it should largely autodetect. If it does not, show us what happened.

hplip is installed.

The only command I have run is lpadmin -p printername

I guess I need to use drv:///sample.drv/deskjet.ppd HP DeskJet Series somewhere but not sure where.

Do I need to run something like - lpadmin -p printername -E -v socket://11.22.33.44 -m drv:///sample.drv/laserjet.ppd ?

atax1a · 2026-02-16T20:26:48+0000

there is a reason we keep suggesting to use the CUPS UI. please try using the CUPS UI to set up the printer initially. It also lets you set it as default.

also when you run a command, it does nobody any good to say that you ran the command without also telling us its output.

balanga · 2026-02-16T20:31:34+0000

scottro said:
What is the result of lpstat -p? That should list any available printers.
For example, I have one printer, which I call BrotherMFC. If I run cupsd, and the printer is not on, I get

Code:

printer BrotherMFC is idle. enabled since Tue Feb 10 13:14:43 2026

If I turn on the printer I get the same thing. So, it basically tells me that I have an enabled printer that is idle.
But it lets me know I have a configured printer.

I doubt whether I have a configured printer.

➜ ~ lpstat -p
printer myprinter disabled since Sat Feb 7 00:09:57 2026 -
reason unknown

I did originally call it myprinter

atax1a · 2026-02-16T20:32:43+0000

per lpstat, you have a configured printer, but it is disabled. again, we reiterate the recommendation.

balanga · 2026-02-16T20:36:46+0000

atax1a said:
there is a reason we keep suggesting to use the CUPS UI. please try using the CUPS UI to set up the printer initially. It also lets you set it as default.

also when you run a command, it does nobody any good to say that you ran the command without also telling us its output.

lpadmin -p printername does not have any output.

I have not run anything else because I don't know what to run.

I'm trying to establish whether there is any interaction between CUPS and my printer.

As I mentioned this is the first time I have installed CUPS and am not even sure whether the printer works.

atax1a · 2026-02-16T20:38:16+0000

in order to do that, you need to configure the printer in CUPS. it is easiest to do this from the web ui. configure the printer from the web ui.

balanga · 2026-02-16T20:47:45+0000

fernandel said:
I have more than 20 years old Hp business Inkjet 3000 and I have installed cups and hplip and hplip plugins. Long time I am using USB connection but also long time I had network connection.
First cupsd must run and than open hplip manager and try to install.

➜ ~ service cupsd status
cupsd is running as pid 4325.

I have hplip installed but no idea what it does.

➜ ~ man hplip
No manual entry for "hplip"

atax1a · 2026-02-16T20:50:56+0000

hplip is a CUPS driver, which should be autodetected from the CUPS UI when you add a printer. Delete the printer you added, and add a new printer from the CUPS UI, which you can get to by visiting http://localhost:631/ on the machine, if it's got a UI running.

If the machine is headless, do SSH port forwarding from a machine with a web browser ssh -L6631:localhost:631 user@host — if you do that, you'll have to visit http://localhost:6631/ in your browser (your ssh client can't bind to the privileged port 631)