Hi Henning I did not mean to start a flame war going, but I was expressing an opinion. I did mention also the manufacturers should get their act together as without their support, the Linux community cannot so their job properly. I do appreciate the help that I have gotten from the mail list. Rene Rebe I think has done a fantastic job on the avision driver for the HP5300C, I don't doubt that for a minute, but why does it have to have the avision name? This conflicts with the normal avision driver. Either it should replace the present, if it is compatible, or if it is different with the patch, it should be called a different name and be selectable in the dll.conf file. I believe Rene talked to HP over a year ago at Cebit and I was recently on the HP website looking for a driver for this scanner for linux. I did sent an email to them about support for this siting Rene's comments, however, have not yet heard back from them.
I do think the programmers are doing a fantastic job on Linux applications, etc., but I do think there needs to be more put into a "Newbie" installing some of this stuff. The community needs input from someone "off the street" not familiar with Linux in order to improve Linux so that it can be used by a normal mortal person. I have sent emails to HP, Nvidia, and SuSe complaining about their support. The only way we can get them to listen is to compain, and if enough people do it, it will finally sink in. My goal is to eventually replace Microsoft on my computer and there is another person that sits right across from me that would like for us to go to Linux. I think we could do that on the server side easy as we are a small company an only have 4 servers right now, but on the desktop, we would need a Linux guru. At home, I only need one more program to replace Quicken Online Banking which should be out very soon. I figure another year before all of the bugs are worked out that I can safely move over to it. As far as the documentation, in the sane faq, most places it calls out find-scanner. I have never gotten find-scanner to work, however, sane-find-scanner works, if you include the path. Have tried numerous methods of getting the /usr/local/bin in the path environment on a permanent basis, none have succeded yet. This is only one example. SuSE has some of the best manuals I guess in the Linux world, but there are some errors in them and some of the commands do not work as advertised, probably from previus versions. There are some linux commands that do not work in SuSE I guess they have removed them. Had some of the same problems with RH 7.2. Hopefully the new Linux standard kernel that SuSE and many other have signed up for will improve this situation. The SuSE website had had little on it for the problems I have had. Search for PATH turns up nothing, and most of the other searches, the info is way outdated. I have found maybe 1% of the info I was looking for on their website. The scanner is only a year old, but I had seen several places on the internet where there was a driver for it. Just did not understand the patch part of the the avision driver, that is, the driver from Rene Rebe's site already has the patch in it. This is not very obvious from the documentation that I had read. Why should I through away a 1 year old scanner? Nvidia was another problem. I never got a reliable system with RH 7.2, so I went to Suse 7.3. Even though it had problems in Suse, it basically worked out of the box. Eventually had to upgrade the kernel and XFree86, now that part is reliable. Got a Xircom PCMCIA modem/network card that was supposedly supported by Linux by bypass the builtin winmodem. Suse would lockup on it. Suse support took 3 weeks to get an answer back, but in the meantime, I fumbled around and got it working. Still don't know how or why. Also had modem problems with Suse on my desktop, same thing. Still have some dialup problems with it. When I upgraded to XFree86 4.2, it killed the sound. Had to install Alsa again to get it working. Tried the blackbox windows manager, decided I did not like it, removed it. Still have a problem when I use gui login to root where the windows manager is twm I think and I can't get rid of it, even though the configuration is setup for KDE. That is still not fixed. So far, linux has been quite frustrating experience as far as getting it installed and operating. When everything works, it is great, just getting it to that point is a bear. What good is an operating system if you can't use it for any real work but just to tinker with? I also did not want to go to Linux simply because it is "free", I do not like the direction Microsoft is headed to control the world with their monopolistic tenticles. But, Microsoft has done some good as far as ease of use and ease of installation. They are just carrying it way too far now. If it were not for Microsoft, would there be any GUI desktops for Linux or Unix now? Probably not with anywhere near the capabilities of todays system. Art -----Original Message----- From: Henning Meier-Geinitz [mailto:henn...@meier-geinitz.de] Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2002 3:18 PM To: SANE devel Subject: Re: [sane-devel] Sane is definately not Scanner Access Now Easy Hi, On Wed, Feb 20, 2002 at 02:05:18PM -0800, Art Fore wrote: > Documentation for all of this is spread all over and some of it is flat out > wrong, especially for these versions. Please explain in detail which SANE documentation is wrong and which one is at a wrong place. I promise I will fix it if I can and if you are right. > Of course SuSE does not help either. Last time I checked there was quite some information in the support database. Maybe it's outdated? > There should be one place for some howtos on installing scanners to work > with Xsane and Gimp. Some information is here: http://www.xs4all.nl/~ljm/SANE-faq.html > I will try to reconstruct my steps and send in. That would be nice. > Every hardware installation takes anywhere from 4 days to two weeks. No, at least not with SANE. > Hopefully the Linux community and the hardware manufactures get their > act together, otherwise, Linux will never be on the home desktop except for > some linux gurus and a few technical people. Sometimes I think it would be better to stay with only "a few technical people" and say so. This way we wouldn't receive rants like yours. BTW: "a few technical people" are the ones that actually create the software you use. Don't get me wrong: criticism is appreciated if you point to bugs in code or documentation. Maybe I got something wrong here but this is the story how I see it: * You want to use a scanner made by a manufacturer who doesn't provide drivers for your operating system * the standard drivers that (most likely) come with your os don't support your scanner (other operating systems don't even have scanner drivers shipped with them) * someone wrote a driver for your scanner without beeing paid by you or the manufacturer of the scanner. He even lets you access his development tree before the release is done and before it's in your distribution's package system. * you have quite a few questions about installation and running. Quite some of them could have been solved by looking at the documentation. Others result from compiling software on your own (and would have existed with any other package) * About 10 people, quite some of them developers of the SANE system you use, try to help in several ways. These are not paid support people but the ones that actively use the code or even created it. * Your scanner works now. Probably tens or hundreds of hours have been spent to write a driver *for you* (and others). Hours have been spent by people trying to help *you*. And despite of all this you are constantly complaining about SANE and Linux. I will never understand this. Bye, Henning _______________________________________________ Sane-devel mailing list sane-de...@www.mostang.com http://www.mostang.com/mailman/listinfo/sane-devel
