[sane-devel] Problem with HP4200C

Henning Meier-Geinitz henning@meier-geinitz.de
Fri, 3 Oct 2003 16:50:20 +0200


Hi,

On Sat, Sep 27, 2003 at 05:55:46PM +0100, ebennet wrote:
> I have just installed SUSE 8.2 on my Dell Inspiron 7000. All has gone
> well apart from my HP4200C scanner.

This scanner is supported by an external backend. This means, that the
backend (driver) is not included in the SANE distribution. It's also
rather old and not much has been done during the last years.

> Installation with YaST has recognised the existence of a scanner
> device and put an icon on the desktop.

I've never used this scanner and not much experience with SuSE so
handle my comments with care. If SuSE provides a package that supports
this scanner, install it. If it doesn't, ignore yast and install
sane-backends manually.

The homepage of that backend is here:
http://hp4200-backend.sourceforge.net/

> The command: sane-find-scanner produces the response:
> 
> "found USB scanner (vendor=0x03f0, product=0x0107) at libsub:001:003
> 
> found USB scanner (vendor=0x03f0, product=0x0105) at libsub:001:004

You have two different HP scanners connected?

> Determined not to be so easily defeated I have located and tried, via the SANE site, the following:
> 
> 1     backend-0.2-p1.tar.gz     This unpacks to produce what appear to be a useful set of drivers for the HP4200, but no instructions on how to apply them.

I don't know that file but maybe you need to copy it into the
directory where you unpacked sane-backends?

> 2     sane-backends-1.0.8-hp4200-0.3.patch.gz

That's a patch. See the homepage mentioned above on how to apply it.
You may get in trouble if you want to apply it to later versions of
sane-backends. I think someone has written an ewer version but I don't
know the location. Try to find it with google.

> 3     sane_hp4200-1.0.3-2mdk.i586.rpm and sane_hp4200-devel-1.0.3-2mdk.i586.rpm

That's and RPM for Mandrake. It may or may not work with SuSE.

> Neither of 2 or 3 can I install using YaST. Both give me an error
> message: error loading package.

Well, that's a really meaniningful error message :-/ Looks like SuSE
has learned many things from Windows.

Once you have installed the backend, check that it's mentioend in
dll.conf and setup hp4200.conf as mentioned on the website. Also be
sure to load the kernel scanner driver (modprobe scanner). If you have
an old kernel, you may need to tell it the ids of your scanner.

Bye,
  Henning