lcl

In my opinion people are reading this all wrong.

Gnome as well as LXDE, Enlightenment etc. will still be in the repositories just like they have been, the only change I see is a streamlining of the install media. There will only be two ISOs, one for 32bit and one for 64bit instead of the twelve ISOs for 2010.2

That's far less work for the paid employees come release time and if the community remains strong we should see a full range of media shortly after release. They won't be officially supported by Mandriva but they will be there.

As long as it will be as simple as urpmi -a gnome I shall be happy with that.

It may be that Mandriva can longer cover all the bases with

diminishing manpower and the need to remain viable. The fact that the

majority of the Mandriva community favour KDE must be a factor in that

decision. Mageia maintains that bias but since it is community based

there seems to be less danger that GNOME would be dropped any time

soon.

Thanks for the responses guys. Never tried a network install and with a low bandwidth it does not look attractive. Will the PowerPack also be KDE-centric does anyone know or will there be more options? I would like to avoid GNOME 3.0 because it is said to be difficult for developers/programmers who need lots of windows open at the same time. Not sure that makes sense but it is what I have heard.

Len

Dear friends

I am trying to understand how the 2011 install works. I am waiting

until the PowerPack is available but am a little concerned about the

status of GNOME. From what has been posted on the web it seems that

GNOME is not an install option, pretty frightening for somebody who

does not like KDE and does not know his way around it. GNOME is

supposed to be available from the repositories but that could mean

trouble for me. I have never attempted to install a complete desktop

environment and doing that from a KDE base is likely to make my hair

fall out. The other reservation I have is about GNOME 3. If that is

all that is available it would be better to stick to 2010.2 and GNOME

2 and lose out on some software upgrades.

So, what about GNOME?

Len

Thanks. Probably.

Loads of ruby stuff there.

Now how do I mark this as solved?

Mandriva 2010.1, ruby-1.8.7 installed

I see from the notes about Mandriva Spring that Ruby 1.9 is available

in 2010.1 Contrib. mcc could not see it so I did "urpmi.update

Contrib" and tried again. Still not there. I have been wanting to

upgrade ruby for ages but prefer to install from a Mandriva compatible

RPM to maintain the integrity of the database. Does anybody know where

it is hiding?

Len

Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear on what happens.

The software from the USB storage is installed on Windows, when the software installed on Windows sees the USB storage it turns it off and turns on the scanning device.

 

usb_modeswitch try's to do the same thing.

I don't have anything that needs this switching so if it doesn't happen automatically I have no idea on how to configure it.

Thanks for the clarification. That makes sense now. So, the B109a driver is able to mimic Windows and switch it to printer mode but hpaio expects the device to be in scanner mode already so it does not see it. That is a guess. If that is so then there is no way to enable scanning in Linux.

Yes I had some idea that that was going on. The usb_modeswitch forum could not help much except that the built-in card reader would be detected as mass storage. It was also suggested that this could be a driver problem and that I would need to run the device on a Windows machine to sniff out what was going on. That is not an option for me - no access to any Windows systems. Now, looking back at your description of the startup process, if the Windows software is already on the device would it not function anyway on power-up irrespective of what os might be used later to access it? I installed the printer on the network right from the start using the front panel - no operating system involved. Or would it need some kind of initial trigger or OK from a Windows machine? From what I remember the installation procedure finished cleanly; no mention of having to set up anything from Windows.

Hate to give up on this; in 15 years of using Linux I have never been beaten by the hardware. There has always been a way.

Not all all-in-ones have the mass storage.

If I understand correctly what happens under Windows is that the software for the device is on the mass storage instead of a CD and once installed the software automatically switches from storage mode to device mode every time the device is powered up or detected on boot.

 

As most manufactures do not fully support Linux we're left to work around problems like this.

Yes I had some idea that that was going on. The usb_modeswitch forum could not help much except that the built-in card reader would be detected as mass storage. It was also suggested that this could be a driver problem and that I would need to run the device on a Windows machine to sniff out what was going on. That is not an option for me - no access to any Windows systems. Now, looking back at your description of the startup process, if the Windows software is already on the device would it not function anyway on power-up irrespective of what os might be used later to access it? I installed the printer on the network right from the start using the front panel - no operating system involved. Or would it need some kind of initial trigger or OK from a Windows machine? From what I remember the installation procedure finished cleanly; no mention of having to set up anything from Windows.

Hate to give up on this; in 15 years of using Linux I have never been beaten by the hardware. There has always been a way.

Thanks for that tip. I remember now having to mode-switch on a Huawei device I used for a while. Installed the Mandriva RPM and shall work on it over the next couple of days and report back. If successful shall also post to the Draisberghof site. The mass-storage thing might explain why I can no longer administer the printer from CUPS on the laptop. Somehow I managed to add the printer as a local and network device - it did require some fiddling, using sockets rather than ipp but now CUPS use the queues, for testpages for instance but cannot administer them. It is all starting to make sense. What puzzles me is how other people have managed to install their all-in-ones without hitting this particular problem.

Len

And there lies the problem.

Install USB_ModeSwitch, it may switch off the Mass Storage automatically and switch to the scanner.

If not then you've got some reading to do. There are several articles on the Internet about its use.

I checked the various hplip components listed on the first of your links and found that all of them except hplip-model-data were already installed. Installing that did not help. The printer was installed under CUPS but when I ran hp-setup hplip could not detect even that although I have been using it already on USB and wireless! There is something weird going on here. As I said sane-find-scanner finds the device on usb but scanimage -L lists only v4l (for the webcam). My hpaio.conf contains the correct usb data but I was not able to add a scanner line because I cannot identify one on my system. I looked for things like /dev/scanner, /dev/usb/scanner, /dev/usbscanner.... Nothing there even after rebooting with the scanner on and nothing on reconnection. Scanning works for the Epson so permissions must be OK. ??

I have just been experimenting and get the impression that the scanner is accessed through the /dev/usb nodes, e.g. /dev/usb/001/007. These vary each time the device is connected. The permissions do not change between connecting the Epson and HP scanners but the groups do.

Results based on output from sane-find-scanner after reconnection:

HP CN509A : scanner on

[root@canopus usb]# ls -l /dev/bus/usb/007/014

crw-rw-r--+ 1 root lp 189, 781 2011-03-27 15:28 /dev/bus/usb/007/014

Here the USB bus node is attached to the printer group.

Epson Perfection

[root@canopus usb]# ls -l /dev/bus/usb/003/008

crw-rw-r--+ 1 root root 189, 263 2011-03-27 15:32 /dev/bus/usb/003/008

When the Epson Perfection is connected it appears under Scanners in harddrake2 but the HP all-in-one goes under USB Mass Storage.

harddrake2 quotes the driver module as scanner but there is no scanner module. SANE does not work that way as far as I know. It needs the appropriate backend to access the scanner so how can it be made to know that hpaio is there? Beats me. I would have thought that installing the scanner under hp-setup would have done the trick but that has to scan for devices and fails. A Catch-22 situation.

Three solid days work and no progress.

Yes, I always have hplip installed because there is always an HP printer installed. I think commands like hp-setup, hp-toolbox are part of the hplip package. I read somewhere that hpaio is also part of hplip but I had to install the hpao1 package separately.

Have you got the hplip packages installed? There's a post on here where someone had the same problem as you, I'll try and find it and link it so you can take a look at trying what they did.

 

EDIT:

 

Links:

 

https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?/topic/105279-hp-photosmart-b109a-multi-unit-solved/page__st__15__p__695397__hl__hplip+scanner__fromsearch__1#entry695397

 

and:

 

https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?/topic/107967-hp-all-in-one/page__p__696375__hl__hplip+scanner__fromsearch__1#entry696375

HP CN509B Photosmart Premium eMFP

Mandriva 2010.1

I installed this as a network printer and have tried over ethernet and

wireless, as a local printer on USB, and printing by email. All work

very well and are easy to set up (CUPS localhost:631 and the front panel). The B109a

driver does a good job for documents and photoprints.

But, no luck with the scanner function. I gather, from this list,

that other people have had problems with similar HP devices.

I plugged it in on USB but xsane could not detect it although

the sane external backend is installed, I think (lib64sane-aio1) and

there is an hpaio entry in /etc/sane.d/sane.dll and also an

hpaio.conf file containing a single line:

usb 0x03f0 0x4811

sane-find-scanner can see it on the usb bus but scanimage -L fails to

list it. It looks like sane does not understand that the backend is

available, so what more needs to be done? Scanning with an Epson

Perfection on USB works fine so user permissions, etc. must be

alright. hp-setup does not see the scanner component either.

Thanks

Len