Both my parallel and n/w printers are HP. I have downloaded HPLIP and all the Foomatic stuff to my pc.

HPLIP contains pre-prepared ppd files but the filter must be created by compiling various classes (cpp & header files). I think the eventual output is in fact a GUI interface but not totally sure.

For Foomatic, everything is in xml files. A couple of c files need to be compiled to create to ppd files from the relevant xml file.

The printer installs fine when using the HPLIP but I cannot print because CUPS is looking for hpcups, as listed in the ppd file from HPLIP.

Do I need to compile on the device? I don't mind doing so. It's just not that user friendly. Suppose because there is only one device (N900), each driver could go into a repo once someone had created it for their printer? Any suggestions of which compiler in the sdk repo?

Which way should I go about this - HPLIP or Foomatic?