Although it is increasingly rare to use 2D printers with scanning, there are many areas and many sectors where you still need to have a good printer working and printing documents that cannot or should not be scanned.
One of the most famous and popular printer brands is HP or Hewlett-Packard. These printers are all over the world and it is the wholesale manufacturer worldwide, so surely more than one of you has been in the need to install an HP printer on an Ubuntu computer. Below we show you how to do it in Ubuntu 18.04. Currently there are two methods to install an HP printer in Ubuntu. One of them is do it with generic drivers that will use the basic functions of the HP printer, this installation is achieved by going to Configuration -> Devices -> Printers and in the panel we press the button «Add Printer»; This will start a configuration wizard to install a generic driver for the HP printer that we select. But HP has been working with Free Software for years and released a long time ago an exclusive driver for Gnu / Linux and for Ubuntu. This is known as HPLIP.
First we have to download this driver. Once we have downloaded it, we open a terminal in the folder where it is and we write the following:
chmod +x hplip-3.18.04.run && ./hplip-3.18.04.run
This will begin the installation of the HP printer on our Ubuntu system. During the installation it will ask us questions that we have to answer with Y in case of Yes or N in case of No. Eye! The numbering that follows the word hplip la we have to adjust to the package that we have downloaded or else it won't work.
Now we will have our HP printer installed in Ubuntu and that means that we can use it to print documents that we have edited or created with our Ubuntu.