Today I scanned my driving license from my Linux (Manjaro) computer. Quite an adventure! ðŸ¤
Step 0: find the document to scan and put it into the scanner.
Step 1: switch on the machine (which is an HP printer actually) and plug it to the computer via an USB cable. OK done!
Step2: try the Scan button. The printer screen shows "Error". Failure!
On my computer the system configuration app was automatically launched and it detected the printer, good news. I tried to install the automatically found pilots but had an error message. Failure!
Step 3: search the web for help. On an Ubuntu forum someone recommended installing HPLIP. OK done!
Step 4: run the newly installed HP Device Manager application and follow the steps to detect and install the device, maybe from the a web interface. OK, not so user friendly but done!
Step 5: search how to launch the scan process in the UIs (HP Device Manager, this web interface...) and eventually find the quickest is to run hp-scan in a terminal lol
Step 6: the scanner makes noises!!! But at the end there is an error and no image file available 😑 Back to search the internet. On an Arch forum, someone redirected to https://bugs.launchpad.net/hplip/+bug/2110079. So what I ran into is a known bug. Is is the end of the story? No because someone shared a patch in there! Thank you thank you.
Step 7: find and edit scan.py to use the patch (in that case, comment some lines). Save and try again the hp-scan command... The document is scanned! Yooh! But in grayscale. Owww... 🎢
OK OK let's not get distracted and... search for HPLIP documentation. I'm sure there's an option to add there. Bingo!
Step 8:Â run hp-scan --mode=color
Drums...
My scanned document in color mode is waiting for me where the terminal says it is 🥲
End of story, I only had to spend 1 hour on this haha. Linux is really for everyone.