Patricia’s HP printer, which I used to use to scan, has died (don’t know if it’s a bad power supply, or it’s just bricked). My Brother DCP-L2540DW laser, which is a great printer, refuses to scan. I can see it with Simple Scan, but I get a message that it cannot connect to the scanner. I went to the Brother web site, and installed their own drivers from rpm (actually from a bash script), and still no joy. A Google search indicates that others have had similar issues, but none exactly like mine (for instance, they can’t print, either, whereas the printer works fine). Any suggestions for trouble shooting?
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You say it’s a Linux issue, but have you tried scanning under Windows, to see whether it’s a hardware or OS issue?
How would I “scan it under Windows”? It is attached to my Linux machine.
Well, hypothetically, I’d unplug the scanner and plug it into a Windows machine, and then see if the scanner works. As I said, that will probably tell you if there’s a hardware problem or not.
HP Printers haven’t exactly been high-quality devices for a very long time. It might be time to just buy a new one.
The HP isn’t that old, but we will replace it if it’s dead. But the problem is with the Brother. It’s on a different floor than the Windows machine.
simple scan gave us no joy. We have a Canon Pixma 922. There is a plug in for Gimp for canon called scangear MP. Works great.
as to printing. You might want to try opening up the properties of the printer and check the IP address, sometimes running a printer install and inputting the IP rather than scanning network works better
I’m not scanning the network. It’s directly attached to the computer via USB.
DJN might have been talking about whatever does name resolution, as opposed to using an IP address. Networking is weird. Sometimes devices just vanish off the network.
Rick,
Yes, exactly. As to USB attached printer, hadn’t considered a non-network attached printer(!).
Rand, maybe you might want to spend $69 on a new state of the art wifi multi-function printer with known current Linux support.
wifi or network-attachable, as taste allows. We have an HP laser printer at the office that has both USB and network ports, and built-in driver support (under Windows, at least. Don’t know about Linux, but I’m just mentioning the general idea. I wouldn’t recommend HP consumer equipment to anyone I didn’t dislike.)
For a USB device attached to a linux host, can’t go wrong using lsusb to see what the device shows up as, and whether a matching driver is installed.