Yes remember that idea. Perhaps all these difficulties are printer revenge.
I thought it was just me who had pdf issues on signing or completing….. glad to know others don’t too. Got one from the bank yesterday and although the pen option worked the fill in boxes did not. It ended up looking like a 5 year old had done it.
More and more Airlines are just doing paperless boarding passes. Which I hate. You cannot always print them and my worry is my phone not working at the airport. So I screen print, email a copy to my wife and to my tablet just in case !
If you can find a better driver that’s not packaged as an rpm, you may be able to use alien to convert it to an rpm. I used to do such things forever ago, but haven’t needed to since then. The only issue was that you usually had to skip converting the pre- and post-install scripts and do any of that manually because they usually do distro specific things.
I have had my share of battles with CUPS. It’s hard to get support for it. I have a script called rcups to restart it. That helps sometimes.
CUPS is primarily a print queue manager, so it can’t turn hardware on and off. It can disable queues though.
You’re using Firefox. That’s good because there’s a longstanding chromium bug (supposedly fixed, but…) where the password dialog for CUPS admin actions never appears.
If you stick to the basics, the CUPS CLI interface is pretty straightforward. I have some scripts that use it.
For a very long time, I used HP printers exclusively because they had HPUX and so supported alll their printers on UNIX then Linux. Since they started Instaink with its phone home and WiFi required to print, I won’t touch them anymore. I’m a fan of Brother now.
I certainly agree with you about HP once being highly respected in the lab equipment field. I served almost 10 years in the US Air Force as a radio maintenance specialist, and our repair shop was equipped with mostly HP test equipment…sturdy and extremely reliable.