[sane-devel] Sane is definately not Scanner Access Now Easy

[Art Fore]

Hi Henning

I did not mean to start a flame war going, but I was expressing an opinion.
I did mention also the manufacturers should get their act together as
without their support, the Linux community cannot so their job properly. I
do appreciate the help that I have gotten from the mail list. Rene Rebe I
think has done a fantastic job on the avision driver for the HP5300C, I
don't doubt that for a minute, but why does it have to have the avision
name? This conflicts with the normal avision driver. Either it should
replace the present, if it is compatible, or if it is different with the
patch, it should be called a different name and be selectable in the
dll.conf file. I believe Rene talked to HP over a year ago at Cebit and I
was recently on the HP website looking for a driver for this scanner for
linux. I did sent an email to them about support for this siting Rene's
comments, however, have not yet heard back from them.

I do think the programmers are doing a fantastic job on Linux applications,
etc., but I do think there needs to be more put into a "Newbie" installing
some of this stuff. The community needs input from someone "off the street"
not familiar with Linux in  order to improve Linux so that it can be used by
a normal mortal person. I have sent emails to HP, Nvidia, and SuSe
complaining about their support. The only way we can get them to listen is
to compain, and if enough people do it, it will finally sink in. 

My goal is to eventually replace Microsoft on my computer and there is
another person that sits right across from me that would like for us to go
to Linux. I think we could do that on the server side easy as we are a small
company an only have 4 servers right now, but on the desktop, we would need
a Linux guru. At home, I only need one more program to replace Quicken
Online Banking which should be out very soon. I figure another year before
all of the bugs are worked out that I can safely move over to it. 

As far as the documentation, in the sane faq, most places it calls out
find-scanner. I have never gotten find-scanner to work, however,
sane-find-scanner works, if you include the path. Have tried numerous
methods of getting the /usr/local/bin in the path environment on a permanent
basis, none have succeded yet. This is only one example. SuSE has some of
the best manuals I guess in the Linux world, but there are some errors in
them and some of the commands do not work as advertised, probably from
previus versions. There are some linux commands that do not work in SuSE I
guess they have removed them. Had some of the same problems with RH 7.2.
Hopefully the new Linux standard kernel that SuSE and many other have signed
up for will improve this situation.

The SuSE website had had little on it for the problems I have had. Search
for PATH turns up nothing, and most of the other searches, the info is way
outdated. I have found maybe 1% of the info I was looking for on their
website. The scanner is only a year old, but I had seen several places on
the internet where there was a driver for it. Just did not understand the
patch part of the the avision driver, that is, the driver from Rene Rebe's
site already has the patch in it. This is not very obvious from the
documentation that I had read. Why should I through away a 1 year old
scanner? 

Nvidia was another problem. I never got a reliable system with RH 7.2, so I
went to Suse 7.3. Even though it had problems in Suse, it basically worked
out of the box. Eventually had to upgrade the kernel and XFree86, now that
part is reliable. 

Got a Xircom PCMCIA modem/network card that was supposedly supported by
Linux by bypass the builtin winmodem. Suse would lockup on it. Suse support
took 3 weeks to get an answer back, but in the meantime, I fumbled around
and got it working. Still don't know how or why. Also had modem problems
with Suse on my desktop, same thing. Still have some dialup problems with
it.

When I upgraded to XFree86 4.2, it killed the sound. Had to install Alsa
again to get it working. Tried the blackbox windows manager, decided I did
not like it, removed it. Still have a problem when I use gui login to root
where the windows manager is twm I think and I can't get rid of it, even
though the configuration is setup for KDE. That is still not fixed.

So far, linux has been quite frustrating experience as far as getting it
installed and operating. When everything works, it is great, just getting it
to that point is a bear. What good is an operating system if you can't use
it for any real work but just to tinker with? I also did not want to go to
Linux simply because it is "free", I do not like the direction Microsoft is
headed to control the world with their monopolistic tenticles. But,
Microsoft has done some good as far as ease of use and ease of installation.
They are just carrying it way too far now. If it were not for Microsoft,
would there be any GUI desktops for Linux or Unix now? Probably not with
anywhere near the capabilities of todays system. 

Art

-----Original Message-----
From: Henning Meier-Geinitz [mailto:henning@meier-geinitz.de]
Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2002 3:18 PM
To: SANE devel
Subject: Re: [sane-devel] Sane is definately not Scanner Access Now Easy


Hi,

On Wed, Feb 20, 2002 at 02:05:18PM -0800, Art Fore wrote:
> Documentation for all of this is spread all over and some of it is flat
out
> wrong, especially for these versions.

Please explain in detail which SANE documentation is wrong and which
one is at a wrong place. I promise I will fix it if I can and if you
are right.

> Of course SuSE does not help either.

Last time I checked there was quite some information in the support
database. Maybe it's outdated?

> There should be one place for some howtos on installing scanners to work
> with Xsane and Gimp.

Some information is here: http://www.xs4all.nl/~ljm/SANE-faq.html

> I will try to reconstruct my steps and send in.

That would be nice.

> Every hardware installation takes anywhere from 4 days to two weeks.

No, at least not with SANE.

> Hopefully the Linux community and the hardware manufactures get their
> act together, otherwise, Linux will never be on the home desktop except
for
> some linux gurus and a few technical people.

Sometimes I think it would be better to stay with only "a few
technical people" and say so. This way we wouldn't receive rants like
yours. BTW: "a few technical people" are the ones that actually create
the software you use.

Don't get me wrong: criticism is appreciated if you point to bugs in
code or documentation.

Maybe I got something wrong here but this is the story how I see it:

* You want to use a scanner made by a manufacturer who doesn't provide
  drivers for your operating system
* the standard drivers that (most likely) come with your os don't support
your
  scanner (other operating systems don't even have scanner drivers
  shipped with them)
* someone wrote a driver for your scanner without beeing paid by you
  or the manufacturer of the scanner. He even lets you access his
development
  tree before the release is done and before it's in your distribution's
  package system.
* you have quite a few questions about installation and running. Quite
  some of them could have been solved by looking at the documentation.
  Others result from compiling software on your own (and would have
  existed with any other package)
* About 10 people, quite some of them developers of the SANE system
  you use, try to help in several ways. These are not paid support
  people but the ones that actively use the code or even created it.
* Your scanner works now.

Probably tens or hundreds of hours have been spent to write a driver
*for you* (and others). Hours have been spent by people trying to help
*you*.

And despite of all this you are constantly complaining about SANE and
Linux.

I will never understand this.

Bye,
  Henning
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