Note to testers of F10: scanbuttond

John Summerfield debian at herakles.homelinux.org
Fri Oct 31 00:28:45 UTC 2008


I've just updated an FC5 system to F9 and one of the benefits is that 
the attached HP Laserjet 3052 (multifunction printer scanner copier) now 
works as a printer. Indeed, it "just works."

I thought to try scanning, and discovered scanbuttond which seems a 
wonderful idea, except as installed it doesn't actually work.

It has a startup script to run it as a daemon, and is supposed to run 
various programs when a "scan" button is pressed. I used quotes because, 
judging from the comments, it is supposed to handle buttons for 
scanning, printing, emailing (but not, as far as I could see) faxing.

However, it doesn't seem to recognise my scanner, and even it it did it 
would not work. It calls scanimage with the argument "-depth 8" and 
scanimage, in F9, does not understand that.

It gets a little worse.
The script, that is supposed to run a part of the daemon process can 
call the Gimp and  Thunderbird, depending on which button is pressed. I 
don't know a way a daemon process, even one running as root, can open a 
GUI on a user's desktop.

It seems to me that it needs a little testing, and that it didn't get it 
before release in F9.

At the very least, "--depth" has to be removed from the scanimage 
command (unless F10's scanimage understands it). If testers with HP MFPs 
and such can test it, that would be really good. I don't have an HP MFP 
and F10 system close enough to do any testing.

I note that there are shared libraries for other brands, it might be 
that the task of getting it working with scanbuttond might not be trivial.

btw  The package needs improvement, conf files aren't flagged as conf 
files and doc files aren't flagged as doc files, and a man page would be 
really good. Debian may have one (Debian rules require it).
  And, the script that is urn when a button is pressed has internal 
configuration. That should be stripped into a separate file and sourced, 
so as to facilitate fixing other bugs in the script, such as "--depth" 
I've mentioned.

Have fUn!




-- 

Cheers
John

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