We have a HP PSC2170 connected to our Linux home server, a HP Microserver. The Microserver is a quite low powered system, something to the order of 14W plus drives. It spins down its drives when idle. Since buying the Microserver I’ve gained a Raspberry Pi which looks a great system for infrastructure projects running at under 5W. Our Microserver is well established and can house the large drive(s).

The Microserver has been providing print and file services using Samba and CUPS. This works well. Until now we’ve not been able to scan.

I installed saned to provide the scanner over the network and xsane to provide a scanning front end on the machine. I have Tight-VNC Server and XRDP to provide remote login to allow users to access xsane.

Saned has the advantage that multiple users can share the scanner. I edited its configuration to allow access to our local network

RUN=yes
RUN_AS_USER=saned

## Access list
192.168.1.0/24
127.0.0.1

I configured the client to find the server.

## saned hosts
localhost

I had to add the saned user to the “lp” printer access group because our scanner/printer combo is recognised as a printer.

# Grant saned user access to printers
sudo adduser saned lp

# Test that saned can see the scanner
sudo -u saned scanimage -L

# Restart server
sudo /etc/init.d/saned restart

The Saned server provides access to the scanner over the network. Sadly it seems that the Windows clients cost money, so Lindsay has been running GIMP over a Windows Remote Desktop Connection served from XRDP. The desktop environment is LXDE.

I disabled the screen saver because it doesn’t make sense to screen save when there’s no screen, and the screen saver saturates the CPU.

@lxpanel --profile LXDE
@pcmanfm --desktop --profile LXDE
@/usr/lib/policykit-1-gnome-authentication-agent-1

It is testimony to Linux that the machine is currently providing interactive desktop for two users, one with many GIMP windows open, the other with Eclipse, on a machine with only 2G of RAM and a relatively low power processor. One user is connected via gigabit ethernet, the other via 52MBit WiFi.