Monday, April 23, 2007

Using a HP PSC 1315 as a scanner under Fedora Core 4

Update (2007-04-24): I've been told (see the comments) that the Linux support works out-of-the-box these days with newer distros. Also, I've got nothing against hplip - it's just that hpoj was the first one I got working with such an old distro. I ran into numerous difficulties setting up this scanner because of conflicting information on the internet and also instructions that just didn't seem to work for my setup.

The HP PSC 1315 stands for "Hewlett-Packard (all-in-one) Printer-Scanner-(photo)Copier". It's a USB colour inkjet and was dirt cheap considering all the functionality - less than $100, years ago. I do not recommend this hardware (see bottom of post).

Now I was interested in getting scanning to work under my old Fedora Core 4 system. The scanner supports 600 DPI and this is more than I need. After much googling and conflicting information, a search string of hp psc fedora got me to these working instructions. This uses the obsolete "hpoj" driver, instead of hplip's "hpaio" driver, but I don't mind since kooka and xsane both work now. Thanks very much to "zparihar" on linuxquestions.org for that useful post.

I can think of only 2 things that I have found harder to install under Linux: support for the Aetheros WPA wireless and an analog joystick. I won't even attempt to set up the printing for the time being since I don't need that capability.

By the way, I initially found this HOWTO Install a USB Scanner guide on the Gentoo wiki, which looks like it could be useful for other scanner models. I gave up on it since it looked too complicated by the time it asked me to add a 03f0:3f11 line (printer USB ID given by lsusb) to /etc/hotplug/usb/libsane.usermap.

I strongly recommend against buying this printer given that Linux support was not out-of-the-box and also given that HP's driver for Windows is horrendous. Regarding the latter, sometimes print jobs go nowhere and deleting them from the print queue does nothing, blocking all future print jobs. Unplugging the USB cable is another sure way of preventing one from deleting print jobs even after reattaching the cable. Some combination of rebooting, reinstalling the printer under a different USB port etc. (I still haven't found a reliable way) is required to delete the stuck print jobs. To make things worse, the "HP Director" application would quit silently after the IE7 upgrade and after applying a patch from HP, it now starts but the buttons don't work.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello,

I have the same printer/scanner. In the past I have also had a hard time getting it to work but in kubuntu (since dapper) it works flawless for me. Scanning with kooka works out of the box, and If I remember correctly for printing I had to walk though a very easy kde wizard.

Cheers,
David

Anonymous said...

How come you didn't want to use HPLIP? It works on Fedora Core 4, and scanning, etc would have all been working from one utility--as well as the extended functionality (clean cartridge, etc).

And this printer works out of the box with ubuntu and more up to date version of Linux, I think it's not fair for you to say that one shouldn't purchase this printer because it doesn't work with 'linux' which isn't the case..

Anonymous said...

works like a charm with hplip-1.6.10, installing it according to gentoo wiki.

Really, adding the new line to libsane.usermap is not that difficult.

Anonymous said...

The printer in question is supported since HPLIP's 0.9.5 release (i.e. since September, 2005) and most of HP's devices work out of the box with modern distros. If you had installed HPLIP package, the only thing you needed to do was to run hp-setup command or to go to Utilities --> HP Device Manager from your menu.

I don't know about HP's drivers on Windows but thanks to HPLIP, most of the people should blindly recommend HP devices for a Linux user. They are even open enough to post a list of supported and unsupported devices
http://hplip.sourceforge.net/supported_devices/combined.html
http://hplip.sourceforge.net/supported_devices/unsupported.html

Just compare supported list against the unsupported one and you should get the picture :)

Clarence Dang said...

aaron and anonymous2:
> How come you didn't want to use HPLIP?
> It works on Fedora Core 4

hplip-setup or hp-setup (sorry, I forgot exactly what it's called since I uninstalled the package because it conflicted with hpoj) could not detect the scanner.

zsz:
> Really, adding the new line to
> libsane.usermap is not that difficult.

Well I stopped because there seemed to be more than that. There was no /etc/sane.d/hpaio.conf for instance.

I'm sure those Gentoo instructions do work for newer distros but I'm stuck with FC4, hence the difficulty.

Anonymous said...

u don't need hpoj (which is deprecated)

All you need to do Printing and Scanning is:

1. cups (install and run service)
2. hplip (install and run service)

3. configure kde printing

4. kooka for scanning (or xsane)

it was not that difficult.. but "Dependency Hell" is still there in Fedora inherited from Redhat.

Anonymous said...

Last time I tried to install an analog joystick, it was mainly a matter of plugging it in and calibrating it. Then again, that was a fairly standard MS Sidewinder (original model, non-USB) and an original SoundBlaster gameport (EMU10K1).

Anonymous said...

Considering I paid $98 for the HP PSC 1315, the performance has been remarkable. I use it strictly for my home computer and general copying, and have not had any issues with pages lining up incorrectly as far as printing labels is concerned. I also have noticed that HP's replacement cartridges cost less than Lexmark's (my previous printer), so that's an added bonus.

Jim said...

I'm new to Linux (as of today). I like my HP 1315 All-in-one because I can transport printer and scanner in a relatively small package. After loading Ubuntu it prints just fine, but I must need a scanner driver because nothing happens when I push the "scan" button. Any suggestions for finding a driver?

RMMlaw said...

I use an HP 8250 Scanner that after 4 years is starting to grab MORe than 1 page at a time in Sheet feed mode. ANYONE have a solution? I know it has something to do with the feed roller but I am not sure how to deal with it.

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