Hi Dean,
I am going to have to pause working on this until the weekend as I have work to do but many thanks for the links. Plenty of suggestions to examine.
I recall also that even when using windows and trying to get the correct connection for updating the printer firmware HP support had to ask me to use the USB connection initially. I shall try editing the Xerox driver as you suggest.
What is annoying is that all the components for scanning are in the uld file installation but the HP support/helper documentation is inadequate.
I found time to examine the ULD driver package (even though I don’t own such hardware), and note that it provides the sfmp backend. It also added the /etc/sane.d/smfp-hp.conf file, but I’m not clear about what would be needed for explicit IP configuration. It seems to rely on its own discovery utility, which in turn depends on the device being in the same broadcast domain, so won’t work in your situation. Anyway, try scanning from a terminal using scanimage like this…
Hi Dean,
Yes it did and from my private subnet too. I now have a test.pnm file in my home directory.
Now all I have to do is get the scanner working. Will read up over the weekend.
Hi Dean,
Back on my workstation and I have the test.pnm showing in my home directory so both of my sytems are working from my private network connecting to device on office subnet.
So far so good but I am having no luck with front ends. Neither are working yet.
xsane opens a small Error window with the text: Failed to open device ‘smfp:net’: Invalid argument.
simple-scan opens the Document Scanner window but when I try and scan I get an error message:- Failed to scan to connect to scanner.
As you reported no errors from scanimage, it appeared that the scan operation was successful. Did you check test.pnm to see whether a valid image was present or just an empty file perhaps?
ls -la test.pnm
BTW, you can choose other image formats using the ‘–format switch’ eg ‘–format=tiff’. Refer ‘man scanimage’ for further information.
I’m not sure why xsane and simple-scan failed to communicate with the remote scanner. Skanlite has a similar way to specify a particular device using the -d option, invoked from a terminal prompt like this…
skanlite -d "smfp:net;192.168.105.41"
…but I suspect that will fail in the same way unfortunately.
Hi Dean,
The good news is that the tests earlier do have an actual image in the scan.
The bad news is that all of the options tried to get what you describe as the front ends to work have failed with the same errors.
Still reading up on this.
Hi Dean and yes I could use the cli but in the present environment it is easier for me to sue a windows machine until this is working correctly.
I read the xsane man pages and there were some possible avenues to follow. Running the command:-
xsane "smfp:net;192.168.105.41"
now brings up several windows and I shall try and include a screenshot when I find out how this works now. The
info page title is below.
unknown:net;192.168.105.41
and there is an Histogram also. On occasions I have also had the page display but this has not been repeated.
Will keep trying as at least xsane found the device whereas simple-scan did not.
Here is the reason why I am not getting a scan:-
alastair@HP-Z640-1:~> xsane "smfp:net;192.168.105.41"
** (xsane:10668): WARNING **: 16:12:25.519: Invalid borders specified for theme pixmap:
/usr/share/themes/Breeze/gtk-2.0/../assets/line-h.png,
borders don't fit within the image
Good to see that xsane can communicate with the remote scanner at least. The error you get is reported in a number of GTK-related threads (various distros), not specific to xsane…likely a bug somewhere. Examples:
I think the bug may be a red herring for me but I was trying to understand why xsane did work, albeit not very well but simple-scan and skanlite failed to connect. You gave me the link to the help page for skanlite, for which many thanks. I had forgotten about using the -h option. I tried the following command:-
alastair@HP-Z640-1:~> skanlite -d "smfp:net;192.168.105.41"
libGL error: MESA-LOADER: failed to open nouveau: /usr/lib64/dri/nouveau_dri.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory (search paths /usr/lib64/dri, suffix _dri)
libGL error: failed to load driver: nouveau
kf.kio.widgets.kdirmodel: No node found for item that was just removed: QUrl("file:///home/alastair/Endeavour - Sunday, September 26, 2021 [6273840938001].mp4")
libGL error: MESA-LOADER: failed to open nouveau: /usr/lib64/dri/nouveau_dri.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory (search paths /usr/lib64/dri, suffix _dri)
libGL error: failed to load driver: nouveau
Qt: Session management error: networkIdsList argument is NULL
I have no idea why the nouveau driver is being brought up here but it suggests an error with the scanner-meta package or similar. Meanwhile however…
The cli command with -d included, not just implied, worked as intended and I have the skanlite gui up and working.
I am not quite there because if I select “Reselect scanner device” it fails but I suspect sloppy code somewhere.
I am hoping you can help me run SANE_DEBUG_XXX to find out what exactly is going on or help me pin down the actual bug I have on skanlite so I can post to KDE support site when you have time.
Meanwhile many thanks for all your help.
The nouveau issue is unrelated to the scanner issue, and you should probably start a new thread for that. I assume that you would see more such error messages if you started other graphical KDE applications from the terminal. Are you using the proprietary driver now?
Why do you need to reselect the scanner device when you start it explicitly pointing to the remote network device in the first place? I suspect that when SANE tries to discover “non-existent” local scanners it will then complain accordingly.
I can have a Skanlite logo on my desktop and was hoping to be able to edit it so that the app runs without me having to enter the cli text every time. I want a dedicated button for this purpose if that is possible.
