[PLUG] Laptop issues

[Fred James]

Denis Heidtmann wrote:
> The need is for a laptop to run an HP S20 slide scanner, using Windows 95 or
> 98, since that scanner has no Linux support.  I have tried in the past using
> Windows 2K under VirtualBox, but that did not work.  It used to work when I
> was dual-booting to Windows ME.
>
> I recently received an HP Pavilion ze5375us with Ubuntu installed. (Thanks
> Russell).  He said that he had to try 2-3 times to get it to boot from the
> CD to do the install, but got it done.  Now the CD does not seem to work.
>  The bios is very sparce, but it shows that it had a CD.  Ubuntu shows it
> has a CD, but can tell me little about it.  wodim --devices tells me that
> the drive is /dev/scd0, but nothing more.  This machine has a floppy!, so I
> booted to a Windows 98 startup disk to see what it would say about the CD.
>  It could not read it either. The message from the floppy said "some drives
> require special drivers", and I saw some comments on the web about the CD on
> this laptop failing due to driver issues.  So this could be a hardware or a
> SW issue.  I took the drive out and gave it a cursory inspection--relatively
> dust-free.  No dice.
>
> So my questions:  Are there suggestions as to what to do next with this
> laptop, or would it be better to look for one with a functioning CD and save
> my energy for less frustrating tasks?  This is cosmetically a very clean
> laptop, but not of use to me without a CD.
>
> Thanks for reading this far.
>
> -Denis
>   
At least 3 of the comments on this article mention that the S20 is 
supported on Linux under SANE and Gimp.
    <http://photo.net/equipment/hp/scanner/photosmart-slide-scanner>
Hope that helps.  I could add that I run an HP OfficeJet 7310 All-in-One 
on Madriva 2008.0 with Gnome, and I have very good results scanning 
(reflective copy) using either Gimp/SANE or HP Device Manager/Kooka (a 
KDE GUI frontend using SANE libraries).
Regards
Fred James