Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I have an older but perfectly functional scanner that is a PITA to get working on Windows because the company never shipped an official 64 bit driver for it. Instead I have to download the driver for a slightly newer model and hack it slightly (add my scanner to the list of devices it supports) to get my scanner to work on Windows. It's so dumb.

As far as I know there isn't a "Postscript over IP" solution for this like there is for printers. There is no generic universally supported protocol that scanners could support that would future proof them.

SANE is a less than completely user friendly experience to set up too. I've found it to be pretty fiddly, although once you get it working it seems to do ok.

Reminds me of some years back when a single driver was added to Linux that allowed it to support 100+ models of webcams. This because every damn brand and model used the same internals, but had different USB IDs.

And we should not forget that RMS' initially rallying call was about printer drivers. where as with the old printer he had the source, so he could add a bit of code to notify the people with jobs in the queue that the printer was out of paper, the new printer only came with a binary blob driver.

Methinks the hardware world is yet another incarnation of what happened in the gpu world, layers of bs folded onto themselves.

A good deal of open hardware, even without sophisticated capabilities would free a lot of time and energy for open source OSes

Same scanner issue here (will try your hack some time)

However >There is no generic universally supported protocol that scanners could support that would future proof them.

There must be... because on Kubuntu it works Plug n Play with the bundled software...

That's SANE, a huge project to re-implement all scanner drivers in one megaproject. It can be a bit of a bear if the plug and play stuff doesn't work. On my scanner it defaults to a driver that only generates a fuzzy black and white image so I have to force it to use the right driver.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com