He opened LibreOffice, hit Ctrl+P, selected the HP M401dn, and clicked Print. The printer woke from sleep— whir, click, fuser warm-up —and spat out ten double-sided pages in under thirty seconds.
Two years later, when the office finally retired that printer for a newer model, Marcus asked if he could take it home. He installed Debian on an old ThinkPad, plugged in the LaserJet via USB, and ran hp-setup one last time.
But the real test came the next morning. The office manager, Denise, walked in with a stack of freelance contracts. “Can you print these from your laptop? The Windows machine is updating again.” hp laserjet pro 400 m401dn driver linux
He opened the terminal. His fingers moved quickly:
Marcus smiled. “Watch this.”
The printer sat three feet away from his desk—a sturdy, gray HP LaserJet Pro 400 M401dn. It was the workhorse of the small journalism office: duplex printing, networking, 1,200 pages of toner at a time. But to Marcus’s Linux laptop—running Ubuntu 22.04—it might as well have been a brick.
“No printers found.”
hp-setup The tool scanned the network. For a moment, nothing. Then—a green highlight.
