Dear experts,
I hope you can give me some guidance with my
situation. I have a wheezy 7.2 system (no extra repositories, no extra
packages - aside from skype) on Dell Precision 4700. I also have an
OfficeJet 6500 e709n connected to network via wifi.
The wheezy hplip version 3.12.6-3.1 is supposed to have full
support for my printer - including scanning support. However, xsane
returns an "Invalid argument" error and despite all my efforts I haven't
been able to scan with it.
I researched this for a couple days and couldn't make the
multifunction printer function fully. As a last resort, I had to try
installing the hplip from hplipopensource site. The latest version there
3.13.11. This install gave me a warning (related to cupsys-bsd -
doesn't exist in repos) and an error (some python error running the
hp-systray) at the end but it works perfectly (as far as I can tell).
I'd like to avoid using anything from outside the Debian
standard repositories. Do you have any suggestions on getting the
printer working with the version in the repos? Or should I confidently move
forward with the latest version of hplip?
I posted this query on the debian-printing list but received no replies. I am hoping some of you may have encountered a similar situation.
I know people have different feelings about using non-free or external software. My preference would be to stay within the official repositories as much as possible (since everything I have needed so far has been addressed by them + the backports) except for this scanner/printer issue. I am not sure if developers would consider backporting a newer version of hplip to backports.