For a while now I've been thinking about some ideas for a project that will require a scanner. No problem you think, scanners of various kinds have been supported in Linux for a long time. I dislike ordering hardware online because of the shipping lag and because I'm a sucker for the retail experience, so I was checking out which devices would work with Ubuntu and which devices were on sale in my local computer supermarket. The latter was a depressingly short list, and the former was getting annoying to search for, but I stumbled on the idea of a multi-function printer. It turns out that it's cheaper to buy a scanner as part of a printer than it is to buy a scanner on its own (granted the resolution of the scanner isn't quite as good, but it's more than sufficient for my needs). The reason for this is undoubtedly that the manufacturers are expecting to make up their money by selling me ink cartridges every few months. As I started to look at models of multi-function printers, one thing became apparent almost immediately - HP have done a lot of leg work on this. I quickly found a bunch of info on their site about how they basically support all of their stuff on Linux, including a page which specifically listed popular distros and which versions worked with which printers. I decided pretty much immediately that I wanted to support this, so off I went to the shop to buy an HP. They had the decent looking F4580 for around £40, so I nabbed that and set off home. When I got home I fired up my laptop running Lucid and plugged the new device in. Less than 10 seconds later I was told it was ready for printing, and I fired up Robert Ancell's excellent new Simple Scan to see what configuration I would need to do to make that work.... the answer being none, it scanned a page first time. Now smug with the ease with which that had worked I started installing the HP driver software on a popular proprietary operating system so I could use it to configure the printer's WiFi feature (something I assumed I couldn't do from within Ubuntu - an assumption that turns out to have been wrong). Ten minutes later it was still finishing off the install process, but eventually I did get the printer hooked up to our wireless network. Back to the Lucid machine, I told it to add a new printer, it immediately saw the HP announcing itself on the network and let me quickly add that and I could print over wifi. Pretty nifty stuff. Then I started poking around with HP's Linux Imaging and Printing software (HPLIP) and noticed that there was an "hp-toolbox" that wasn't installed. This is the tool I should have used to configure the wifi network on the printer; It also shows the ink levels and lets you kick off scanning/printing/cleaning type jobs. Out of sheer curiosity I went into hp-toolbox's preferences and changed it from using xsane to simple-scan, and told it to start a Scan. I wasn't expecting it to work because the device wasn't connected via USB, but it turns out that not only does the device support scanning over WiFi, it works in Linux. It's not quite as fast as a direct hookup, but it's certainly significantly more convenient! So there we have it, out of the box I was up and running within 10 seconds of plugging the device in, and if I'd known to just install hp-toolbox I would have had everything running wirelessly a few minutes later. This being compared to installing CDs and dealing with great gobs of driver/application mess (I've seen HP's Windows drivers and it's no fun trying to persuade them to update themselves, or to persuade them not to prompt you to register every week). A huge, epic victory for Linux and Ubuntu - and one that I seem to find with much random consumer hardware these days. A few years ago this post would have been full of complicated commands and scripts and compilation as I described how to make the device work, but now all I can do is be smug about how easy it was :D Win.