Scanner's firmware HOWTO and suggestions for improving user's experience with scanners

[Bastien Nocera]

On Sat, 2008-12-06 at 23:53 +0100, Jean Francois Martinez wrote:
> Some scanners need a firmawre file who, while it cannot be provided by 
> Fedora can be legally downloaded from the manufacturer's site.  The
> problem is that Fedora provides zero hints about it.  
> 
> I have an EPSON USB scanner (snapscan driver) and if you look at the
> sane-backends doc it says _nothing_ about firmware and it points to a
> web page who hasn't been updated in _eight_ years.  In other words
> official documentation is zero help.
> 
> In the following I detail what to do and make a few suggestions for
> improving user experience with scanners requiring firmware.

The SANE UI(s) should probably rely on PackageKit's session daemon to
download the file automatically, as necessary. This is a process similar
to what we have for codecs and kernel firmwares, and what we want to
have for mime-types and fonts.

Flegita (gnome-scan's scanner UI) is probably the best place to request
such a change. See
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/browse.cgi?product=gnome-scan and
http://projects.gnome.org/gnome-scan/index

Cheers