Getting HP Scanjet G2410 scanner working in Linux

[Jonathan183]

My old scanner stopped working fairly recently so I got a replacement. This time I got a HP Scanjet G2410 flatbed scanner ... thinking its an HP and must be well supported in Linux .

After quite some searching I came across this, and downloaded the zip file from here. The scanner seems to work fine with just the contents of the hp2400.tgz extracted and put in /usr/lib/sane .

Looking at the contents of some of the files it appears that HP have developed this at some point but don't publish it not even with a this may work but we won't support it discaimer.

I did start working through this but was not sure if I had to upload firmware to the scanner and could not find relevant information from the drive CD supplied with the scanner.

Anyway, I thought I would share incase it helps others ...

[Rubberman]

I sounds like you got it working with the unsupported hp2400.tgz sane driver file(s). SANE is a standard scanner interface that is supported by most scanners these days, much like VESA is a standard graphics interface that works with just about any video controller. In either case, the standard will let you use the device, but cannot support all the capabilities of high-end devices, which is why there are device-specific drivers and support software. Unfortunately, a lot of the world still revolves solely around Windows and Linux is just a poor country cousin, to be ignored until they strike oil on the north 40 acres. HP is not a big supporter of Linux on their consumer hardware. Yes, they are a big Unix/Linux house when it comes to their big iron Itanium servers, but that is solely because their customers for those systems insist upon it.

[Jonathan183]

I started this thread after getting the scanner working with Arch Linux. I decided this last weekend to get the scanner working with Crux and Gentoo as well. Crux worked using prt-get depinst sane xsane then installing the HP2400 drivers.

The HP drivers are available from here. Extracting the hp2400 information is sufficient, and the four files libsane-hp2400* need to be copied to /usr/lib/sane/

I emerged sane-backends and xsane thinking that would do what I needed but it didn't (running scanimage -L or xsane gave an error about undefined symbol sanei_usb_init). I needed to install sane-backends-1.0.21-r1 to get the scanner to work (which currently has ~x86 keyword).
Having got it working I added

SANE_BACKENDS="hp"

in /etc/make.conf because I don't need all the backends building .

Ed: I also created an overlay (/usr/local/portage) with sane-backends in, and edited the sane-backends-1.0.21-r1.ebuild to have keyword x86 instead of ~x86. After that I had to cd to the sane-backends folder in my overlay and run

ebuild sane-backends-1.0.21-r1.ebuild manifest

Then I reinstalled from my overlay having added

source /usr/local/portage/make.conf

to /etc/make.conf and created /usr/local/portage/make.conf with contents

PORTDIR_OVERLAY="
/usr/local/portage
$PORTDIR_OVERLAY
"

Not the most elegant solution ... but it works for me .