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

[Akkana Peck]

Rick Moen writes:
> 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.  

I agree in general, though CUPS might be a special case.

My husband and I recently bought two printers: a Brother HL-3170CDW
(color laser) and a Dell E310dw (monochrome laser). Both
specifically offered Linux support and were listed as fully
supported on ... some website, can't remember if it was
linuxprinting.org or another one.

I tried to use the CUPS web interface (on Debian testing) to
configure them. In both cases, there were several versions of the
printer available in the CUPS menus, but after spending a couple of
hours trying every combination of driver and port, I couldn't get
any of the available versions to work.

In both cases, I ended up going to the manufacturer's website,
downloading a couple of .deb files, installing them, and then
going through CUPS configuration again, and was able to get
them working after some additional CUPS fiddling.

I think this probably says more about bit-rot and lack of testing
in CUPS, rather than anything that actually contradicts Rick's
point. No question, it's best to try the open-source drivers first.
But in the case of CUPS, it looks like mostly nobody's testing
those drivers, and sometimes the ones from the printer manufacturer
are the only ones that work.

For scanners, as Rick says, there are a lot of models that aren't
supported by SANE that are supported by non open source programs.
But (as he also says), if you do your research before buying, you
can probably find one that SANE does support. Even then, you may
have to do a little extra fiddling, such as creating a udev file to
set the permissions so you can access the scanner as a non-root
user: always test sane-find-scanner as root before deciding that the
scanner is unsupported.

        ...Akkana