Getting the HP Photosmart C5180 fully working under Windows, the natively supported OS, was nothing for the faint of heart. This is especially true for my setup, where the printer is accessed via wireless and is running in a different private 192.168.x.x subnet compared to my computers.

In contrast, under linux, getting the printer to work was a peace of cake. Enter the IP, select the printer type, done. Finished. That’s it. For the three times I needed a scanner in the last three years, I reverted to my spouse’s laptop. Well, up to now that is.

Today, ten minutes later brought me a fully working setup. How? Simple, use the hp-lib tools provided by Ubuntu by default. In a first step, you need to create an URI for the printer which is then used by xsane. For this purpose use the hp-makeuri command as explained here

hp-makeuri your ip

This gives you an uri under which xsane can access the scanner. For this to work properly, add the hpaio driver to your /etc/sane.d/dll.conf, see here.

Once this is done, you can access the scanner with an URI as follows:

xsane -p hpaio:/net/Photosmart_C5100_series?ip=192.168.10.10

PS: And yes, this is also some kind of personal documentation.