To cheat hp-plugin

Enjoyed the use of Zorin 15 for quite a long time, Zorin 16 had come out recently. To update the system in use to the new Zorin release and to get rid of the damaged hard disk housing the OS. I made up my mind to have a clean new installation of the new Zorin release in a new SSD. 

It was easy to set up the new system and everything seemed to be OK. It was the HP all-in-one printer that cause the problem. The printer functioned good, but the scanner did not function. Whenever a software wanted to make a scan, a hpaio I/O error with the scanner was reported. I did not have any hints on what was happening. Of course, Google is the place for me to ask for a solution. After reading a lot form those related articles, I concluded that I had to re-install hplip and run hp-plugin. When I ran hp-plugin, it needed to download the plugin. It said the plugin downloaded was corrupted and quitted. So, I got the plugin from the net and gave the path to hp-plugin. It said Zorin is not an approved OS and quitted. I asked it to select the OS as others. That is Ubuntu, the ancestor of Zorin.  It went ahead and then told me that a lot of dependencies were not available and asked me to install them manually. OMG, what a tedious works. I tried, but some of them are not available from the depositories. Ther was no way to solve the problem, all failed, I thought.

After a long time of thinking about the matter, I decided to cheat the program hp-plugin. I got a copy of the os-release file from an Ubuntu machine to replace that of the Zorin machine. Then run hp-plugin again, it worked. The plugin was installed successfully and the scanner can then be work properly.

Sometimes, a trick can help you work around and save a lot of times.