
Surprise
Having used a multifunction Canon printer/scanner/etc for many years this would not be a surprise to me at all. The surprise would be if they made it work first time.
Windows 11 24H2 is still causing problems with multifunction devices despite Microsoft marking an issue with the eSCL scan protocol as resolved. A Register reader got in touch to say they still had trouble with a Canon ImageClass MF269dw, a multifunction printer, copier, scanner, and fax machine. They said: "It works on a …
The installer needs to install drivers and software for all users, so it needs admin rights. It checks to see if you are in the admin group and/or that it can write to the system directories. If it can't, it can't install. There is nothing you can do about that.
It is the same for a lot of software.
Correct, but the point is that the way it 'checks' to see if the user is an admin is flawed. If you're using a domain account that's a member of a group that's added to the local administrators, it'll bounce you because it's looking for a direct membership.
It's an example of someone that's trying to add something 'smart' to software and shooting themselves in the foot.
It'll work on a home PC where someone is just logged in as a local admin.
Apropos things included - I note that the installation logs for my recent update to Mint 22 listed 600k+ files... what the hell is any OS doing with 600k different files? How many files does W11 include in a bare install? (Ok, Mint install includes office, comms, and development stuff, but even so...)
Not sure about number of files. Keep Home. Install from fresh. 15 minutes. Two reboots including update. No need to go back through the MicroShit give us all of your data and switch off the irritants. New screensaver pictures as well. Nice! Not sure if much else changed coz nothing stopped working.
Camilla "Year of the Linux Desktop since 2000" Smythe.
Hmm 698,722 items in Root. At least 500K of them will be symbolic links. Don't see a problem.
Anyone got a figure for Windows?
The more I read about Windows 11, the more I think seeing if I can get my desktop to dual-boot to some version of Linux for Mere Mortals and migrate as much as I can to there before the extended support runs out and I have to move to Windows 11 for what's left..
Also, and in no way being smug, I've found Hamrick's VueScan to be invaluable in getting scanners to just work for years. I'm not touting this as a solution because I'm not on Windows 11, but it's free to try out.
"dual-boot to some version of Linux for Mere Mortals"
I'm unduly proud of my Christmas hols endeavour to convert a 2013 Chromebook to run Linux Mint, after hardware hacking to enable a bios overwrite, pushing the Chromebook into dev mode, overiding a zillion warnings, and then installing Mint. And it works! Ten years+ late to the party I hear the audience gasp in horror, but I'm pleased my "cribbed from multiple websites" endeavours worked, and I have a Google-free lightweight laptop that's running modern, supported software. However, it's not really for Mere Mortals. There's a lot of good software that can be run from the Mint software manager, but anything that isn't in the Linux Mint repo, then you're having to revert to command line to install everyday Linux software (eg Seamonkey). Again, I achieved this, but for noobs like me I'm copying potentially risky software commands from internet forums without really knowing what they are doing. Acceptable for an ageing Chromebook that's largely a browsing tool, not what you'd want for your main computer. Beyond an out of the box install of a mature Linux distro you'll have to get to grips with the difference between tarballs and binaries, and the fact that the Linux install process may not do things you'd assume are obvious (like adding a new program to the menus) and all those bash, curl, sudo commands with complex syntax. There is LOTS of help on offer, but often involves interacting with forums inhabited by people who can and will help, but don't really appreciate the deep ignorance a noob has. Installing different software on Windows is a dream compared to some of this. Likewise Linux printing or display scaling can produce challenges that Windows users will (generally) not be familiar with.
Obviously more familiarity will help, and if I can do it then so can you - just accept that there's a learning curve. Curiously, it's a steeper learning curve if you're IT savvy than if you're not - I put Ubuntu on my 80+ year old mother's almost-as-old desktop rather than pay for a Windows version upgrade that the hardware wouldn't work with. I let the install include the default apps and she just got on with it, as she simply wanted it to work and wasn't looking to install additional apps. She had no idea she was using Linux, because everything from UI to OS to apps to hardware to the broadband and the wider web is just "the wifi" in her world.
All of which might sound negative about Linux, it isn't - I wish I'd Linuxed my Chromebook years ago.
It's funny; Zorin OS is a Linux distribution that's been specially designed to make Windows users feel at home—and yet I never see it mentioned by people who are entertaining the idea of switching. I suppose it just isn't as well known as Ubuntu or Mint...
What is Zorin OS? Linux for People Who Don’t Want to Leave Windows
Yes, but Windowsifying Linux is just putting users in the uncanny valley of operating systems where it nearly, but not quite, works as expected, and is utterly impossible to troubleshoot over the phone.
I'm a big fan of Elementary OS for people who want to move away from Windows.
Zorin is what I put on my CiL's computer years ago when her W7 got hit by ransomware.* I can't say it really resembles what I recall of W7 to any great extent but it was easy enough for her to use. Useful reminder - I promised I'd go over this month to update it to latest version.
* Beginners! write out encrypted version without overwriting original. Everything sitting there, waiting to be discovered with PhotoRec
"I've found Hamrick's VueScan to be invaluable in getting scanners to just work"
Heartily agree.
I purchased a cheap Canon LiDE scanner over a year ago specifically for Linux support. Canon's scangear software was a bit of washout even after the acrobatics of installing on RHEL8.
I installed the vuescan software which just worked but without a licence the images have a watermark which can be removed from existing images with the licence enabled software. I would have happily purchased the software but my need for a scanner had evaporated.
I suspect the watermarks could be fairly easily removed at least in principle without a copy of vuescan but given the excellence and reasonable price of the software I wouldn't even contemplate discovering how.
Vuescan demonstrates software doesn't have to be shitty even on a Windows platform.
I did that back in 2003, getting away from XP. I had a nice system with a hot-swap drive bay, one with XP for gaming and one with Linux for work.
I've swapped back and forth over the years between Windows, macOS and Linux. Currently mainly macOS, with a few Linux boxes for specific purposes (E.g. PiHole) and at work Windows VMs for testing.
But even then, it's incredible how incompetent microsoft is despite their track record of incompetence.
It seems that another "feature" of a windows 11 downgrade is the fine manager ceasing to work and it seems the only fix is to reinstall windows (but if you are going to install an OS, you should install GNU instead).
Still, I've gotten a scanner to work on Trisquel GNU/Linux-libre and it still works fine?
I would ask the question of how they manage to break so many random things that they probably haven't even touched, but sadly I suspect I know...
Just like a lot of other 'mature' projects that have drifted with time and semi-competent maintenance it has got to a point where it only stays upright by luck and habit. Any fiddling risks random collapse of bits that when checked probably should never have worked at all, no one is quite sure how it all worked as the people that really knew are retired or relocated, and patching is based on luck as much as is science.
Meanwhile management are convinced all is perfect, that everything is fine, and all those new shiny features can be added quickly and easily on top of all the other 'finished working' bits.
It's sad when you recognise the pattern & know it won't be fixed. And that everyone else's efforts are similarly borked, sometimes even worse...
One could almost suspect they've abandoned proper (or any) regression testing - You don't just test a change, you retest every related change ever made - a long and tedious task but essential if you don't want to release buggy software. I realise that doing that properly for something as complex as an operating system is expensive but MS are not exactly cash poor and firefighting after a release is even more expensive.
> no one is quite sure how it all worked as the people that really knew are retired or relocated, and patching is based on luck as much as is science.
I find that very hard to believe. Microsoft have, for many years now, sold the finest, most full-featured knowledge management product there is in the form of SharePoint. Surely they've stored all the documentation the dev's have produced over the years and the key information is right at their fingertips through the class-leading search capabilities of the product?
Perhaps their fate was sealed when they failed to maintain the Ms. Dewey search engine?
As someone who has been told a few times too many that the info I need is in our sharepoint server and "easily available and searchable" I feel your pain. Has anyone ever been able to search AND FIND anything relevant in sharepoint?
Never even mind the nightmare that is an update/new version with the migration of the existing collections...
Way back in the Window 3.x days I worked as a contract employee at Microsoft, and one day found myself chatting with someone from one of the other buildings about the recently released DOS 4.0. She mentioned that there were old parts of DOS that they hadn't dared touch.
"Why?", I asked.
"Because we lost the source code."
"Oh ... How did that happen?"
"Don't know, we just can't find it. It got lost along the way."
Seeking to assess whether she really knew what she was talking about, I asked "What was your involvement with the project?"
"I'm the product manager."
24h2 is a major new release, under the covers. They have made a lot of changes. There was also the whole thing about printer drivers etc. being insecure and a lot of tightening up of security around how the whole printer and scanner drivers work. So, not really a surprise, manufacturers slow to update their drivers, most users never updating drivers, unless something stops working and MS messing around in the background, it is ripe for disaster.
We installed Windows 11 24H2 and our scanners stopped being usable. We researched the issue and found that there was a known issue in 24H2.
KB5048667 is supposed to resolve this USB/scanner issue. We applied this update and restarted the computers. We are still unable to scan.
On our Fujitsu scanners, for example, we get the error message - No scanner is found (SX03047E). The scanner shows up in Device Manager as an Imaging device. These are all USB-connected devices which are unavailable.
We did have the option to roll back to 23H2 with a couple of impacted computers. Once we had gone back to 23H2, we were able to use our scanners again.
Unfortunately, we have some computers where going back to 23H2 is not an option currently.
Fujitsu says they are waiting on Microsoft. I can't get any traction with Microsoft directly...
I had a similar problem, going from Windows XP to Windows 7 on my brother-in-laws computer. He used a ScanSnap and Fujitsu's response was to buy a new scanner (the old one was 5 years old, but still working fine). We eventually got hold of someone in support who took pity on him and we got a "private" download link to install a Windows 7 compatible driver. We had the same problem again, going from 7 to 10, but he bought a new scanner that time round.
I'm running an HP MFD - but it's a ~10-year old laser printer from HP (M127).
Also, I'm not running Windows at home (except a work VM for the rare WFH project).
Printer and scanner have never been a problem for me.
Of course, it would probably help if I printed more than 20 pages a year :)
But the joys of Laserjet is that I don't have to worry about clogging the printhead with so few print jobs.
/me looks at HP printer, looks at Windows 11. Sighs.
Honestly, I've had the printer (MFD) for years, and it works fine. I got it for something like $80. Operational cost is arguably a little high, but the device itself has been reliable. Windows 11 24H2 is a little more dodgy, but my Bluetooth mouse is working again, so I've got that going for me.
In Latin, that could be Window's motto.
Just to be fair, I actually dislike Linux more than I dislike Windows. Linux has been so long in development and they still can't be arsed to make it consumer friendly. Geek arrogance at its very worst.
"Linux has been so long in development and they still can't be arsed to make it consumer friendly. Geek arrogance at its very worst."
Interesting. And when did MS take Windows out of development and make it a long-term only-needs-security-updates consumer-friendly system?
So far, the only consumer-friendly part is that they got the computer hardware guys to pre-install Windows. If consumers had to install Windows on their computer, forget it.
At least with Linux, I can have a fully-functioning system in less than an hour (complete with updates) that doesn't require searching for extra drivers.
I dunno, I work on the wiring side of technology (layer 1 to you network geeks) and the only thing I remember about my Linux training from 30 years ago is ls -l, but I had Cinnamon Mint working on my machine in just an hour or so, and everything transferred over pretty quickly. It took me longer to get the new computer to let me turn on Windows so I could access the firmware and boot from USB than it did to boot from USB and load Mint. If I can do it, anyone can.
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" ... Just to be fair ... "
Actually I think that bit of your comment doesn't mean what you think it does ......
" ... Linux has been so long in development and they still can't be arsed to make it consumer friendly. ..."
How long has Windows been in development? And here we are talking about how they can't make it work with a MFD that it worked with BEFORE the last up-date. And shall we talk about the other shit they broke? Or the "fixes" for broken shit that broke other shit
Nothing fair at all about your comment.
"they still can't be arsed to make it consumer friendly"
Who's "they"? And in what way is it not consumer friendly?
Your answer to the first would be quite significant because "Linux" as a generic concept ranges from servers to desktops (and on to numerous consumer devices including Android devices and all sorts of stuff where it's embedded and not really visible in any typical computery way).
From my own PoV I use Linux because I want to do actual stuff - mostly, these days, historical research - and don't want something that gets in the way. I want browsers, an email & newsgroup client, office suite, graphics SW etc. that Just Works. I really haven't time to faff about with stuff that doesn't. Devuan/KDE provides all that, all through GUI applications. SWMBO also uses Devuan/KDE. A cousin-in-law uses Zorin. It all Just Works. I call BS on your contention.
By comparison I have an old laptop that came with W10. For a long time it ran as my daily driver once I'd blown away Windows & installed Linux (Debian back then). When I replaced it as a daily driver I reinstalled W10 from its backup and made it dual boot. AFAICS W10 is useless. If I turn it on now it spends all its time failing to update and chewing up pretty well all its throughput doing it.
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> gift from Microsoft: Surprise, your scanners don't work
A truly unexpected gift from Microsoft as it's normally Canon who break their own scanners. (Looks ruefully at Canon ImageFormula 215 that I now have to run in a Windows 7 VM because Canon arbitrarily decided that they weren't going to support it anymore).
Yep - Canon consigned old LiDE scanners to the dustbin for people moving on to Windows 10 - I've kept using them on Linux without any issue. It is also possible to run them on a Windows 7 VM under Windows 10 - guess that would also apply to Windows 11
<smug mode> Since switching my main desktop to Ubuntu a few years back I've had almost zero issues with printing and scanning. I had almost ground my teeth to the gums in frustration over connecting printers with Windows, but the Linux desktop has made surprising leaps and bounds in this area. It's very satisfying turning up at a job site and being able to instantly add almost any network printer without any driver downloads and have it just work. </smug>
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Sorry Windows users, Canon broke this for us Mac users several years ago and you've not a f*cking hope in hell of it getting fixed!
Having gone round and round with their (in)famous tech support gets you a "you need to buy a new model printer"
I've told them to shove a sock in that as my printer/fax/copier worked perfectly fine until they BROKE it!
There's a special place in sCUNThorpe for them, right next door to HP now.
PS> For those who suggest VueScan they want £49.95/year for the privledge of using their app for which even the free version doesn't work with our 2017 Canon 510!
For those who suggest VueScan they want £49.95/year
Although they offer a subscription *option* for the standard edition at £7.95 a month, according to this, the £49.95 price for the standard edition is for a one-time (i.e. one-off) payment. In other words, they give you the choice, which is more than you can say for a lot of companies these days.
Yes, it's unfortunate that it doesn't work with your Canon 510, but at least you were able to try it out without having to hand over any money first. And it's not Vuescan's fault or responsibility that Canon's software was crap, nor their job or obligation to remediate that, act as unpaid support on Canon's behalf or let you have their software for free.
And the internet continues to be infested with the mindset of the "X" patrons as they flee Musk's grasp, spewing vitriol, bile, and curses wherever they go... *sigh*
Hint: In civilized society, cursing stopped being "cool" around the time you started working and paying your own way in life. It does happen... under extreme circumstances. But you hardly needed to capitalize your brilliantly creative spellings to highlight the curses in case anyone out there "didn't get it."
Windows 8 completely borked my Minolta film scanner, a Canon A4 flatbed scanner, a very expensive roll feed A0 inkjet printer, and an elderly HP laser printer. ALL OF THEM! MS response was "you need to update = renew your obsolete devices" In excess of £ 4500 for that lot!
Oddly enough the whole setup worked perfectly when I tried Ubuntu - so much for device incompatibility will always stop people using Linux... I now use an HP 400 series B&W laser, an Epson 700 scanner and a Canon Pixma inkjet, all working perfectly and reliably together under Mint 22. Plus Vuescan and Turboprint - Linux versions - as they add lots of useful control and functionality.
Ask yourself why I abandoned anything to do with M$ all these years ago... and have never looked back since.... Simples!
Seeing an Epson scanner on that list, never used it under Windows but two things I miss from the Epson app in OSX now that I'm exclusively Linux is the ability to shove four strips of negatives (or a dozen 35mm slides) in a holder and have the thing auto-select and scan the individual images, and the very simple "click on a white bit" facility for correcting the colour balance of faded images. Can't find a way to do those under Linux though I admit it's been a while since I looked. Ours is a Perfection V750 I think?
Other than that, for basic scanning, Linux was a doddle - plug in and it works. Printers with Postscript and network sockets never seem to cause trouble either, though I do prefer to configure IP addresses and such manually for them.
On OSX it was even relatively easy to scan some old 110 and 126 negatives and my dad's old 2¼" transparencies, that's a bit more "manual" in Linux. The OSX app died with our Core Duo (not Core 2, so OS updates were quickly impossible) Mac Mini.
M.
I was able to get the scanner described in Richard Speed's original article working by following the procedure described here:
https://community.usa.canon.com/t5/Printer-Software-Networking/Fix-For-MF-Scan-Utility-Failures-Windows-11-24H2/m-p/520000/highlight/true#M21784
Be sure to delete the device and all the Canon software first. Then reinstall the Canon software and follow the intricate procedure described above.
Be sure to disable to the device before updating the driver as described.
Be sure to reboot the system at the end of the procedure.
The device is working for me, but the repair seems fragile.
Because the device also was working under 24H2 before this fix, but only when all network connections are wired, the software defect might be a race condition. (Wire is fast).
Good luck to you if you are struggling with this. Many thanks to Mr. Speed for bringing attention to this issue.