HP Device Manager does not come up

[scamidge]

Previously, I followed steps listed at

System update failed - how to resolve?

Please, I beg of you, use the </> button to format code and/or place the output in between 3 tics like so; ``` ## code and stuff ## ``` Anyhoo. Your update went through. Now you just have all the other maintenance. Including Unwanted, Foreign and Deprecated packages Pacnew files You also have at least 9 different kernels installed, some of those no longer maintained, and at least one of them being real-time (which should only really be used by media professionals).

But now have now lost the printer. App HP Device Manager does not come up.

And the Choose Ignored Updates still have a very large number in the pamac app

If I run hp-toolbox in terminal I get

[steve@steve ~]$ hp-toolbox

HP Linux Imaging and Printing System (ver. 3.24.4)
HP Device Manager ver. 15.0

Copyright (c) 2001-18 HP Development Company, LP
This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
This is free software, and you are welcome to distribute it
under certain conditions. See COPYING file for more details.

-Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/hp-toolbox", line 280, in <module>
    toolbox = ui.DevMgr5(__version__, device_uri,  None)
              ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/usr/share/hplip/ui5/devmgr5.py", line 242, in __init__
    self.Is_autoInstaller_distro = core.is_auto_installer_support()
                                   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/usr/share/hplip/installer/core_install.py", line 2016, in is_auto_installer_support
    self.get_distro()
  File "/usr/share/hplip/installer/core_install.py", line 639, in get_distro
    name,ver = utils.get_distro_name(self.passwordObj)
               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/usr/share/hplip/base/utils.py", line 2602, in get_distro_name
    ver = version[0] +'.'+version[1]
                          ~~~~~~~^^^
IndexError: list index out of range
[steve@steve ~]$

[cscs]

These appear to be python errors, which I would normally associate with an AUR package that needs a rebuild. But hplip is in the repos.

Have you rebooted since your large amount of updates?

And/or what package is providing hp-toolbox (maybe its not the regular hplip)?

pacman -Qo hp-toolbox

@scamidge

And the Choose Ignored Updates still have a very large number in the pamac app

And I still dont know what this means.
We already checked and no IgnorePkg is set anywhere.

…maybe this is referring to available AUR updates?

[scamidge]

[steve@steve ~]$ pacman -Qo hp-toolbox
/usr/bin/hp-toolbox is owned by hplip 1:3.24.4-2
[steve@steve ~]$ 

Yes, I did reboot.

[Yochanan]

Thanks for creating a new thread regarding your printer issue.

@scamidge

If I run hp-toolbox in terminal…

I receive the same output.

Unfortunately, we’ll probably have to wait for HP to fix the issue upstream.

[Teo]

hplip 1:3.24.4-2 seems indeed to be broken, since i see the same errors.

[cscs]

With confirmation that there is a problem with the package itself you may choose to employ a temporary downgrade.

Make sure we have the tool needed:

sudo pacman -Syu manjaro-downgrade

Do the downgrade:

sudo downgrade hplip

Now choose some other version. You can optionally allow downgrade to automatically add hplip to the Ignore list, but you might opt not to, so you dont have to manually remove the ignore later.

Extra Notes for the public;
downgrade of any form should always be a last resort.
Do not use it lightly and take care not to forget about Ignores you may have applied.
Partial upgrades are unsupported.

[scamidge]

I downgraded to the previous version but it is still broken.

[Takakage]

This won’t necessarily help the OP, and is from a very cursory examination, but it kind of looks like there may be something specific to the script’s treatment of Manjaro.

/usr/share/hplip/base/utils.py appears to get some information from the (apparently deprecated) distro.linux_distribution() function (lines 2523-4).

name = distro.linux_distribution()[0].lower()
ver = distro.linux_distribution()[1]

distro.linux_distribution() returns ('Manjaro Linux', 'rolling', 'Yonada')

Lines 2600-2 appear to expect that the version will be numeric (i.e. 24.2.0), and doesn’t know what to do with “rolling”.

if 'manjaro' in name.lower():
    version = ver.split('.')
    ver = version[0] +'.'+version[1]

A comment on lines 2537-8 suggests that they expect Manjaro to return “arch” as the name, in which case they would have obtained version from lsb_release instead.

# platform return 'redhat' even for 'RHEL' or 'arch' for
# ManjaroLinux so re-reading using lsb_release.

[Ben]

@scamidge

I downgraded to the previous version but it is still broken.

I downgraded to a few previous versions… and downloaded the latest hplip-3.24.4 installer from their website.

You can try installing hplip-minimal.

However, I can confirm (and the reason I hadn’t noticed) that the printer still works well without it.

[Takakage]

I’m a little out of my depth here, but as an experiment, I was able to get hp-tools to open by modifying /usr/lib/os-release and removing the VERSION_ID=rolling line.

This specific line was added in a recent change to the filesystem package.

 ID_LIKE=arch
 BUILD_ID=rolling
+VERSION_ID=rolling
 ANSI_COLOR="32;1;24;144;200"
 HOME_URL="https://manjaro.org/"

distro.linux_distribution() then returns ('Manjaro Linux', '24.2.0', 'Yonada'), as expected by hp-tools.

Note: I do not recommend modifying this file. Rather, the change in filesystem may need to be reverted. And Moderators should refrain from editing other people’s posts and putting words in their mouth.

[banjo]

Well done to you!
I wouldn’t have noticed, haven’t had any need for printing/scanning lately.
But:
By briefly changing /usr/lib/os-release, I was able to renew my plugin, then go back to the original.
Now I can print/scan, and wait and see who has to move - HP or Manjaro.

[Teo]

Pinging @philm on that (the change in filesys package).

[scamidge]

Thank you for the suggestion. Without the minimal version, I can print and scan with a non-HP scanner. But cannot change anything in the print-queue etc. So it probably will not add to what I can do and I should just wait for a fix to become available rather than monkeying around.

[scamidge]

Thank you Ben for the additional suggestion. It worked, but I no longer see your comment with the Kate instruction. Lost it! Strange.

[Ben]

Yes, I was actually out of line adding that edit to someone else’s post, so it is now redacted. I should have posted it as a separate suggestion rather than squeeze it in to the already accepted Solution.

There is a chance that editing the file could cause issues in other areas of the system, so I admit I was a little hasty there… If someone wants to do the edit, they should be competent enough to work it out for themselves perhaps.

Note: I do not recommend modifying this file. Rather, the change in filesystem may need to be reverted. And Moderators should refrain from editing other people’s posts and putting words in their mouth.

I will be using the printer tomorrow - so I went ahead.

Make sure you bookmark the solution - you can refer back to it and restore the file if you face issues in the future.

[Yochanan]

Thank you for pointing out the issue.

It’s resolved with filesystem 2024.11.25-2.

[philm]

Sorry for the issue. Seems Version_ID can only be a number. Since neither Arch nor Manjaro provided that value in os-release I patched the nvidia-driver-assistant to ignore it also: [pkg-upd] 0.9.57.01-4 (26f74fc9) · Commits · Packages / extra / nvidia-driver-assistant · GitLab. That was the original reason I added that value to begin with. The proper example is documented here. So it would been better to fix the application nvidia-driver-assistant due to this: Note that operating system vendors may choose not to provide version information, for example to accommodate for rolling releases. In this case, VERSION and VERSION_ID may be unset. Applications should not rely on these fields to be set. This is now done.