[sf-lug] Xsane can't see an HP Laserjet 1536dnf MFP scanner / printer

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):

>     Never a disk with Linux drivers have I seen for printers,
> plenty for Windows and MacOS.

That is _so very much_ the wrong thing to wish for.

Drivers from hardware manufacturers are almost invariably extremely
buggy, proprietary, brittle, and binary-only.  You really should not ask
for that.  Wrong.  What IMO you should wish for is hardware
manufacturers giving full, useful hardware documentation without
requiring an NDA to the open source community, so the community can
create, and maintain within Linux distributions' mainline codebases the
drivers and keep them usable and of high quality as the underlying
software systems evolve.

>     My Epson NX515 - printer/scanner/copier is such a device.

_Correct_ name is Epson Stylus NX515.  This is an inkjet-based all-in-one
device.   Like most inkjet printers, it's pretty not-good and Epson is
pretty uncooperative about it with the open source community, but the
Gutenprint print-filter ('driver') collection got printing support
working for it through reverse-engineering starting with version 5.2.5
in February 2010.

Buying this multifunction device with its manufacturer's pretty terrible
record for lack of cooperation is, to a degree, asking for trouble, not
to mention that inkjet devices in general are both pretty terrible, very
expensive to operate on account of the very high cost for ink supplies,
and the tendency of inkjet manufacturers to regard all information about
their technical specifications as a trade secret.  On the other hand, 
since there's apparently been about a decade for the open source
communtiy to reverse-engineer this thing, that partially offsets its
disadvantages.  (Too bad it's not a good enough device for experienced
driver coders to want to buy, which would motivate them to improve
driver support sooner instead of ignoring it because they'd always avoid
such hardware.)

That leaves the question of the scanner ('SANE') backend support.  

In 2010 when this thing was new, the (terrible) sole option was to
install the proprietary, binary-only 'iscan' SANE backend, proprietary
add-on sane-backends-iscan, from a company called 'Avasys'.
https://pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201007/page22.html

Looking at actual open-source solutions in 2018, via the
http://www.sane-project.org/ supported-devices lists for both the
production and development release, there is still zip.  _So_, 
here we are in 2018, and your scanner solution for the Epson Stylus
NX515 is still:  Go to the Avasys Web site and separately download
the proprietary, binary-only, secret-sauce 'iscan' SANE backend
for it.  Retrofit that onto your Linux w/SANE installation.  (I don't
know for a fact that Avasys forbids Linux distros from distributing its 
proprietary driver set, but that's the usual situation.  Also, few
Linux distros wish to take on that headache, anyway.)

_Or_, what I would do:  Sell the Epson Stylus NX515, and get something
that doesn't suck.  

> A lot of models can be frustrating to work with, for someone who needs
> the printer to do real work it must be maddening.

Simple solution:  Don't buy shoddy printers.

A problem you didn't buy into is one that you don't need to solve.