Nothing to do with VueScan, but I just went through a journey trying to find a good solution for an old HP laserjet/scanner combo that I picked up used for $40.

Nothing to do with VueScan, but I just went through a journey trying to find a good solution for an old HP laserjet/scanner combo that I picked up used for $40. Although it's not wifi enabled, and has no Mac support (that I need for a couple of laptops in my household), I got it running perfectly on a Raspberry Pi, despite some difficulties with the HP driver "ecosystem". (Why do they make it so complicated..) Once I got it working, I set up `saned` and was able to scan from my Ubuntu laptop over wifi just fine using `gscan2pdf`, which has a horrible user interface but at least gets the job done. Honestly it was a bit surprising to me to discover how terrible the scanning landscape still is in open source software, but I guess it's just not one of those things that is needed that often so some basic projects that were thrown together a decade ago still kind of work and that's that. I can accept that. However, despite printing working fine for all machines, I absolutely could not manage to get any kind of "bridge" working for scanning from the Mac laptop, which apparently uses a different scanner API called TWAIN, and no amount of messing around with TWAIN/sane bridges worked out. Not to mention that one of the two Macs was a "work" laptop for which it was not allowed to install drivers or system software. The whole time I was thinking, man, all I want is some web interface where I can log into the RPi and drive the scanner, and download the result, why is that so difficult. Lo and behold I came across this amazing project that solved the whole problem for me: https://github.com/sbs20/scanservjs https://github.com/sbs20/scanservjs. I'm not affiliated with it, but I was just so impressed at how well it worked that I feel the need to mention it, and give kudos to the author. It was even easy to get running, just a single docker command on the RPi and it was up and running. The laptops can connect easily, of course, because it's just a local web server, and you can do multipage scans to PDF, which is really all I wanted. Fantastic bit of OSS, highly recommended if anyone finds themselves in a similar situation. Forget remote protocols and installing drivers, etc., just run this on the Pi and you're in business.