Hi,
I was just wondering why xsane on Tumbleweed detected no devices
although I had a HPLIP scanner configured.
The reason is simply that all backends are commented out in
/etc/sane.d/dll.conf by default. Together with sane-backends-
autoconfig, that may work well with USB scanners, but not with network
scanners like mine. It's also in stark contrast with Fedora, where only
16 out of 88 sane backends are commented out in the shipped dll.conf
(xsane startup "scanning for devices" takes about 5s in that
configuration on my laptop, compared to roughly 2s when only the
hplip/hpaio backend is enabled).
I understand that users are supposed to run "yast2 scanner" to enable
their scanner HW. That works, but I wouldn't call it a smooth user
experience for my network scanner (none of the many HP scanners the
tool offered matched mine even remotely - I knew it was fine to choose
just any "hpaio" device, but would every user have known that with
confidence)? AFAICS, the completed "yast2 scanner" run had no effect
other than uncommenting "hpaio" in dll.conf.
Here comes the question: Couldn't we improve the openSUSE user
experience by enabling more sane-backends by default?
Regards,
Martin
PS: for HPLIP and other "external" backends, it would be cleaner to
register the backend in /etc/sane.d/dll.d rather than in
/etc/sane/dll.conf directly, but that would require YaST support as
well.
--
Dr. Martin Wilck