After running debian stable for a while on my laptop, I made the stupid move to unstable. Apart from a number of other annoyances, scanning using my HP all-in-one device at home would not work anymore. Tonight, I decided to finally sit down and try to find a fix for it. The problem, scanimage -L found the device just fine:

gmc@monk:~$ scanimage -L
device `hpaio:/net/HP_Color_LaserJet_CM1312nfi_MFP?ip=10.1.2.4' is a Hewlett-Packard HP_Color_LaserJet_CM1312nfi_MFP all-in-one

But scanning failed:

gmc@monk:~$ scanimage
scanimage: open of device hpaio:/net/HP_Color_LaserJet_CM1312nfi_MFP?ip=10.1.2.4 failed: Error during device I/O

So, after googling around, trying a thousand-and-one proposed solutions that worked for other people, I tried a few debug options. What led me to the answer was this invocation:

SANE_DEBUG_HPAIO=8 xsane

This reported it could not load a restricted library named /usr/share/hplip/scan/plugins/bb_soapht.so, which indeed did not exist. The answer: run hp-plugin as root, let it install a bunch of super-evil proprietary files from HP (yes, you need to sign in blood, sell your soul, all that), and behold: scanning works!

Of course, this is documented nowhere. Well, it is now. Hope this helps some other poor victim of the gpl-jihadists that are the debian developers :)

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 26th, 2010 at 23:20 and is filed under English, Science 'n stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.