Some progress in support for HP USB printer/scanners

[Mayuresh <mayuresh%acm.org@localhost>]

Have always struggled to get HP USB all-in-one printer (F380) on NetBSD,
though hplip and sane are known to support it and they work on Linux.

Some of the past mails on this are in this thread:
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-users/2011/11/20/msg009600.html

Recently I tried it on 6.0 rc1. Do not know whether changes from 5.1 to
6.0 in NetBSD or any developments in hplip have helped, though now the
device is getting detected fine (with ugen enabled in kernel, which was
tried before also).

However the printer is still far from functioning. Seek advice on
following attempts to make printer and scanner work:

Please bear with the length of the mail and do suggest if there is
something I could try:


1. Printer with cups:

The cups web ui shows printer state as : "/usr/pkg/libexec/cups/backend/hp
failed"

The said file exists and exits with 0 status if tried manually. No idea
how to analyze this further. The error logs showed nothing that sounded
like any hint.


2. Printer with lpd:

Tried setting up as per NetBSD user guide. Not sure what device to set as
print device. There is a bunch of them as /dev/ugen0.* and /dev/ugen1.*

Trying to redirect text to /dev/ugen* devices (one by one) did not seem to
bother the printer.


3. Printer with hp-print (from hplip)

Going to try this, though it seems to have qt dependency. Taking long time
to build.


3. Scanner with sane-backend

sane-find-scanner detects the scanner now, though scanimage doesn't. Also
tried as root, so permissions is not an issue. The hpaio backend is known
to support this scanner and the same is mentioned in dlls.conf file as per
installation instructions.


4. Scanner with hp-scan (hplip tool)

This works! But scanning is terribly slow. Accidentally launched hp-scan
again before previous one fully finishing. This resulted in hanging of
NetBSD and had to be powered off.


5. Passing the device to qemu and making Linux deal with printer and
scanner:

Tried passing options like -usb -usbdev host:0x03f0:0x5511 to qemu guest
Arch Linux, though lsusb on the guest does not show this device. Not sure
what is the right way to pass the device.


I am using NetBSD 6.0 RC1 on i386 and current pkgsrc.

Mayuresh.