Need help to setup an HP Color Laser MFP 178nw printer

Hello there,

I’m fairly “new” to Linux despite some experience from something you could call high school and generally during my work career. Now I got me a Lenovo V15 G4 83FS0025GE laptop dedicated to running Manjaro (can’t find the version right now but I think latest stable) with KDE Plasma 5.27.10 to just get some general experience with the distro.

It’s refreshing seeing something else than Windows day in and out but I struggle with the most mundain things. As the title says I need some help with setting up an HP Color Laser MFP 178nw printer that I finally fixed after a long time and I thought why not make it work with the laptop for some printing.

During my attempts I managed to get as far as having it print 20 pages with nonsense characters which is certainly due to wrong drivers but I also can’t seem to find the right ones in the printer list.

Is there any way I can search for a specific printer in this list with thousands of entries? I also installed the HP Device Manager to give it a try and it cannot even find the printer.

Here some details about the setup. The printer is 2 rooms away and the laptop was an idea to make it easier for me to just print some PDF files instead of pulling network cables all the time of getting them installed in my home. Don’t ask why but there is just no fixed internet here besides 4G/5G mobile data. So for now there is no fixed network via LAN (yet).

I tried downloading the HP drivers for Linux but I don’t think it’s working properly since the .sh files didn’t work but I probably didn’t do it right. After 4 hours of trying I just sort of gave up and thought why not ask you guys.

Please guide me towards the right places where I can either get what I need to have it work or let me know if there are even drivers for it. But based on this guy’s post I would say there is but I am currently just too unskilled to find it. Topic of a german guy

Thanks in advance for any helpful info and sorry for the long story.

Have you already read:

:footprints:

I think I forgot to mention it but yes I have read it and that’s where I learned about the HP Device Manager that didn’t seem to help either. :confused:

@JustSomeGuyFromIT

Install HP Device Manager,
run a hp-setup -i or hp-setup -u for graphical or interactive (console mode)
It should download what you need, and then work.

By hp-setup --help, you see what else you can do with it.