HP Deskjet F4185 All-in-One on Debian GNU/Linux -- Effortless!

One of the things I've always dreaded about printers has been Linux compatibility. I have somehow always have had trouble installing a printer on my box, due to which I have always hesitated while buying one. But finally my mother got one for her office and I had to set it up for her. She got herself an HP Deskject F4185 which has a printer, scanner and copier.

The copier doesn't need any drivers since it's function isn't related to the computer. So the job was to get the printer and scanner going. So what did I do?

Just apt-get install hplip and then installed the printer driver (which was auto-detected by the way) using CUPS web interface. Somehow, the scanner was also detected and installed -- I didn't have to do anything for it. The only hiccup was that the scanner device had default permissions only for the scanner group, which all my users had to be part of. So I added my users to the scanner group and done!

So if anyone's looking for a decent easy to set up PSC, this is an alternative.