[ILUG] usb scanner

[Rick Moen]

Quoting pat o'leary (pat.oleary at rte.ie):

> i've just been given a new HP Scanjet 3530 usb scanner very cheap, but
> despite much searching around the net have not yet come up with a way
> to get it to work with Linux. 

My personal one-stop cheat sheet for solving Linux hardware-support
issues (among other things):

http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/help-resources

You'll note that I have USB URLs and scanner ones.  Both are relevant.

Searching the SANE (scanner software) site for HP 3530 support in the
release version of SANE software doesn't give any hopeful results.
Ditto when searching the CVS version's support.  Hmm, sounds doubtful.

Let's switch tactics, and try the Linux-USB site.
http://www.linux-usb.org/USB-guide/x291.html points out that there's a
generic USB scanner driver provided with Linux kernels, which is capable
of supporting "just about any scanner", but that parsing that scanner's 
output hinges on support for it in an appropriate SANE back-end driver
set.  So, yes, I do think you're hosed, man, unless a 3530 happens to be
compatible with one of the models listed at
http://panda.mostang.com/sane/sane-mfgs.html#HEWLETT-PACKARD .

You might want to ask HP to please share the full firmware-interface
specs on their scanners with the SANE software people.  They've been
notably unhelpful in that area, and I vaguely recall that all support
for HP scanners to date has been derived through reverse-engineering.

Of course, it's possible there are options I'm missing, in which case I
hope someone will speak up.

-- 
Cheers,                 "Heedless of grammar, they all cried 'It's him!'"
Rick Moen                       -- R.H. Barham, _Misadventure at Margate_
rick at linuxmafia.com