HP Deskjet F2180 stops after printing half of a page

I’ve just installed the 64bit version of Ubuntu 9.04 onto my main desktop PC. Everything was going well until I wanted to print a document.
No, my printer was correctly detected and when I clicked ‘print’ the printer burst into life as expected. But after printing about half of the first page the printer just stopped. My printer is a HP Deskjet F2100 series (F2180 to be precise).

I tried everything, google didn’t throw up anything useful, I installed later HP drivers but noting fixed it.

After a lot of head scratching ad experimenting I did notice something odd. The USB device as owned by a user I did not have permissions for. I wasn’t expecting this to be the cause of the problem because if it was due to permissions then surely the printer would not print at all?!?

I was wrong, and adding myself to the group that owned the USB device has fixed it. As this seemed quite off the wall I thought I’d share…

So, first, see where the printer is connected:
[sourcecode language=“bash”]lsusb
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0dda:2027 Integrated Circuit Solution, Inc. USB 2.0 Card Reader
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 03f0:7d04 Hewlett-Packard Deskjet F2100 Printer series
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub[/sourcecode]

So its bus 002, device 003.

Next lets have a look at that device:
[sourcecode language=“bash”]ls -l /dev/bus/usb/002/003
crw-rw—-+ 1 lp lp 189, 130 2009-08-30 17:25 /dev/bus/usb/002/003[/sourcecode]

So the group is lp
Next add the group lp to any users that need access to the printer. Remember to user the -a switch to append to the existing group list.

[sourcecode language=“bash”]usermod -aG lp userid[/sourcecode]

You’ll then need to log off and back on for the permissions to take effect.