2008-01-03 21:48:45

HP ScanJet G3010 in Fedora 7

For the last bit of photography I did for Crown, I received a $100 Best Buy gift card. I needed a scanner for a long time, so I decided to see what Best Buy had in that area. I found the HP G3010, which offered excellent resolution at a very good price, sub-$100. With shipping and handling it was $105-something. So I ended up getting the scanner to my door for $5 out-of-pocket.
Now the fun part... can I make it work? Of course, there is 0, zip, nada in the way of linux support for these things. But, it's a scanner. How hard can it be?
Saving you the story, here's what you need to get going.
XSane is the gui for SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy). Don't you just love the names some linux tools get? Anyway, you need that installed. I use GIMP to do my photo editing on Linux, so get that too, in addition to the xsane addon for GIMP (xsane-gimp).
The G3010 has not been "tested" by the SANE guys, however it does function with the HP3900 drivers. So, go to the SourceForge page to get them (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=150599). Unpack that and execute (as root) INSTALL.sh, choosing to install this package as a backend when asked.
By default, this driver looks for the scanner to identify itself with a usb ID of 03f0:4205. That usually works. If you have trouble with XSane finding your device, check to see what your system sees it as.

> dmesg | grep usb <output snipped> usb 5-1.1.3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 31 usb 5-1.1.3: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice

Now that we see the newest usb device plugged into our system is at address 31, let's see what it's ID is.

> lsusb Bus 005 Device 031: ID 03f0:4205 Hewlett-Packard Bus 005 Device 027: ID 0424:223a Standard Microsystems Corp. 8-in-1 Card Reader Bus 005 Device 026: ID 0424:2504 Standard Microsystems Corp. Bus 005 Device 025: ID 0424:2502 Standard Microsystems Corp. <output snipped>

Address 31 is our HP with a usb ID of 03f0:4205, perfect. If yours is different, you'll have to edit /etc/sane.d/hp3900.conf to change the address. Here is what mine looks like.

<output snipped> # HP Scanjet G3010 usb 0x03f0 0x4205 <output snipped>

Now the easiest way to get it to work is to open GIMP (as root, since normal users can't directly access usb devices), File > Acquire > XSane: Device Dialog.... If you have more than one device XSane recognizes, you'll have a list to select from. Otherwise you'll be brought to the XSane interface where you can preview what's on the flatbed, scan it, and tweak a ton of settings. Have fun!
To prove that it works, here are some old photos I found in a box that I decided to scan (not tweaking any XSane settings).