I’ve installed the printer under Sarge and don’t remember all the details of how I did it. Here I will just mention the things I had to do to make it functioning after the upgrade to Etch.
First I searched the Internet and found www.linuxprinting.org and their OpenPrinting database. There I found information about the drivers for my printer that work with Linux.
To do it Debian way I opened Synaptic and checked if there is HPLIP package and sure it was. Installed it and the printer was once again responding to the print commands.
added on 3.9.2007
One day my printer stopped to respond and searching for solution I found even easyer setup method.
apt-get install printconf
Printconf installs some additional packages and after the installation is finished, my printer worked again.