The Portable Consultant was given the task of scanning and printing Favourite Daughter’s class schedule today.

It was not as easy as it could have been.

Had I been running Windows at the time it would have been semi-automatic, of course. But, no, I was running Kubuntu – the KDE version of the popular Ubuntu Linux – and I had never reached out to my old HP ScanJet in that environment before.

Naturally, I googled official Kubuntu documentation. The documentation said “Software wise Kubuntu comes with the application Kooka, the KDE scanning and OCR installed”… and then told me exactly where in the menu system to find Kooka.

No such luck.

Google’s top hit was out of date documentation. There is no Kooka in the LTS 10.4 Kubuntu version.

Next I turned to Ubuntu.org’s documentation where there were pointers to the Kubuntu distribution. (Generally, Ubuntu assumes you are running Gnome rather than KDE so Kubuntu stuff can be off in the corner somewhere and the big Search field at the top of the page will not be of much help.)

Anyway, here I found reference to SANE (‘Scanner Access Now Easy’) the full-featured Linux package. This is so full-featured, however, that it comes with a huge list of dependencies – related packages that are required for SANE to install. There were so many of these that it looked as if much of Gnome had to be installed before SANE would work.

So I continued my research.

Finally, I came across a discussion group posting that pointed out Open Office had built-in scanning functionality under the ‘Insert-Picture-Scan’ menu sequence… so this is what I used.

I could also have installed ‘Simple Scan’ from the Kubuntu software package list but I already had Open Office on my system so I avoided adding more software by using that.

What is the moral of this story? With desktop Linux, even the most simple tasks require some research.

I should mention that I went through a similar exercise to get Kubuntu to ‘see’ my printer. I did not have that issue with mainstream Ubuntu.

Cheers,
-pmh