Troels Kofoed Jacobsen’s blog

I have always struggled to get my HP LaserJet 1020 printer to work under linux. Furtunately this is always possible by manually installing the foo2zjs printerdriver and the firmware manually. However, I think this is a horrible solution, as I don’t like manually installed software (usually I make myself a rpm).

Today I then found the Right Solution(tm) (it has probably been there all the time): The hplip package provides a small HP setup utility named hp-setup, which will install the printerdrivers for you. (And set up the printer, but we really don’t want this, because Fedora does this on the fly, when the driver is there — I just removed the entry again). Afterwards I had to restart the printer to load the new firmware. It instantly popped up in Fedora and I were able to print. Tada.

So in other words:

yum install hplip hplip-gui
hp-setup

(You don’t really need the -gui part, only if you don’t like the cli)

Update:
I had some problems with this on Fedora 11. It seems that the correct .ppd file for the printer is not installed. However, it can be found in the package foo2zjs:
yum install foo2zjs

After installing this I got the printer working.
Maybe you have to select the .ppd manually during the hp-setup step. This is found here:
/usr/share/cups/model/HP-LaserJet_1020.ppd.gz

References:
http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/models/laserjet/hp_laserjet_1020.html