Did a clean install of 15.6 over 15.5. I have had an HP6978 Officejet Pro print-fax-scan device during the 15.5 period, and even for awhile in 15.3, and both the printer and scanner were configurable through Yast, though the procedure seemed to change slightly with almost every new release. The device is connected to my home network wirelessly, and configuration of the printer always involves Manual Discovery as part of running hp-setup. When I upgraded to 15.5 from 15.3, the printer configuration proceeded through this path, and then the scanner, and its corresponding hpaio driver, were found without further steps of Manual Discovery. In 15.6 the printer configures through Manual Discovery again, but while the Manual Discovery process in the scanner configuration certainly finds the same 6978 device, there is no entry in the driver list for any model close to 6978. So I chose HP Officejet Pro 8500 Wireless as possibly the closest model and get the error: Failed to activate hpaio. In addition, when I check dll.conf in /etc/sane.d, there is no entry, commented or uncommented, for the hpaio driver. However, there is a separate directory in sane.d called dll.d that contains a single file “hpaio”, and it contains simply the character string “hpaio”. Is this the correct setup?
I would probably go file a bug against hpaio on bugzilla.opensuse.org, as I don’t really use the software (no HP printer/scanner devices to test with), so I’m not sure where to start.
Just in the future, can you please break your typing up a bit, that big wall o’ text with no linebreaks or paragraphs is a bit hard to read and parse.
HP OfficeJet Pro 6978 is end-of-life:
https://developers.hp.com/hp-linux-imaging-and-printing/supported_devices/index
There is a non-security hplip update available for openSUSE Leap 15.6 from version 3.23.8 to 3.24.4. Try a downgrade to hplip version 3.23.8 and check if this older hplip version still supports your end-of-life print/scan-device
# rpm -qa |grep -i hplip
hplip-udev-rules-3.23.8-150600.4.3.1.x86_64
hplip-hpijs-3.23.8-150600.4.3.1.x86_64
hplip-sane-3.23.8-150600.4.3.1.x86_64
hplip-3.23.8-150600.4.3.1.x86_64
Save money for a new HP M283fdw.
Thanks for pointing that out. But wouldn’t that imply that the printer should not configure also, because the driver would be missing, but it is not? The hpaio driver is provided for many hp scanners, with no implication that it is customized for each new device, so it is unclear why my choice of the 8500 didn’t work. But the error message was not that hpaio was’t there, but rather that it couldn’t be activated, and that seems more relevant to my discovery that there is no hpaio entry in dll.conf.
The hardware still seems functional enough for my needs, a pity the software development cycle seems to have made it a paperweight!
A workaround has presented itself…
I opened up HP Device Manager in the System Menu. I asked it to find HP devices, it presented me with the basic Manual Discovery process, I typed in the printer address and voila’ it found the printer, and its driver. Choosing the printer, not the Fax option, I went to the Actions tab, and there was “Scan”. Clicking on that…xsane came up, as it always has in the past. I scanned the CUPS test page, no problem.
Going back to Yast, I checked whether both the printer and scanner had been found and configured, and yes they both had.
This was a heck of a lot faster and simpler than the Yast dialogues.
And I get to keep my end-of-market printer!