Saturday, April 19, 2008

Lexmark x9350 is not for Linux

Ok, I got the scanner and printer. I found out that the reason it's cheap is because it's discontinued. It hooks directly to Ethernet, but is uses a bizarre direct binary networking that only works with XP. They have no intention of going to Linux, and, in general, Lexmark is very Linux unfriendly.

Luckily, I still have an XP computer on the network. The advantage of networking is that I can have the scanner in the basement, and the XP computer can be upstairs. The software converts scans to pdf, so I can zoom them down to the Linux machines.

The automatic feed is tricky, but does work with photos. The scanner is very fast, compared to the old one.

To get something better would be to go up to a full pdf network scanner, and those things are very expensive. I'm keeping it.

ps. the document feeder really doesn't work for photos, but using 150 and the flatbed is pretty fast, and you can pile a lot of photos on the xp machine.

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