Dear All, This is not really a question but rather an observation which I made today and which could be very useful for desktop users. It concerns use of scanners (even Windows only printers).
As we know the standard way to access scanners on OpenBSD is using sane-backends drivers. They support a fair number of scanners in particular better flat bad USB scanners. Some all-in-one devices produced by Epson are also supported. Sane-backends are supposedly supporting large number of HP made all-in-one devices via proprietary hpaio library which is a part of HPLIP. Unfortunately HPLIP is written with Linux only in mind and it works rather well on OpenBSD only due to heroic effort of our developer Antoine Jacoutot. Luckily it turns out that you do not need any software or drivers to scan with most HP all-in-one device! My wife has a HP Photosmart C5250 all-in-one. C5250 comes with several readers for various types of flash memory cards commonly used by digital cameras. If you press scan button the small menu pups up on the C5250 display with gives you option of scanning directly onto the flash memory card. At the same time a generic kernel of OpenBSD to which my HP all-in-one is connected via USB sees the same flash memory card as a standard SCSI HDD. I just mounted the flash memory as mount -t msdos /dev/sd0i /mnt and I could see a directory on /mnt with scan images. I would guess that the above trick works for any all-in-one or scanner device which has flash memory cards readers including the one produced by Canon and Brother which are not supported by sane-backends. I could even see that you could print on these all-in-one devices without any drivers as long as the kernel sees card readers as SCSI HDD when the all-in-once are connected via USB (or network). You just send your files to flash cards and once there you print directly to printer. Enjoy, Predrag Punosevac P.S. I hope you will find above hardware solution for printing and scanning as interesting as OpenBSD way of VoIP (ssh+aucat).
