We have probably all at some point had to replace a peripheral not because it is faulty, but because it is no longer supported by our operating system. It’s especially bad for Windows users, but for older hardware this is increasingly a part of the Linux experience too. [George MacKerron] is here with what may prove to be a valuable technique to keep these devices active. He’s running a minimalist x86 computer in the browser, with just enough OS to support the device.
In this case the hardware is a USB scanner, and the resulting software takes a WebAssembly x86 emulator and adds a bit of glue software allowing it to use WebUSB to talk to the real-world hardware. It runs a minimal Alpine Linux environment with SANE — something that’s normal for Linux users but which has never been there on a Windows machine. The result is something which needs no installation, but can be run on any machine with a powerful enough web browser.
While such an approach might at first seem like overkill, we’re told it runs surprisingly quickly. In this case it’s for scanner, but we can see it could find a use with many other pieces of aged hardware.
If WebAssembly is new to you, we gave it a primer a few years ago.
Header image: Fir0002/Flagstaffotos, GFDL 1.2.
Golly…
The questions is not “does it works or not?” it’s “Why in hay was the support dropped in the first place!?”
We already hit the “it’s now a webapp”, so, what’s next? Fuzzy drivers? Where an AI tries to guestimate how the device works?
Tried with a LiDE 210, got:
“Error, please reload
Failed to execute ‘open’ on ‘USBDevice’: Access denied.”
Will stick to VueScan, but was hoping for a free alternative!
Changed driver with Zdiag as suggested, and full page 600dpi 16 bits color scan took about 1-2 minutes. So useful for the odd scan but a bit slow if you’re going to do many scans. I suppose if you have a lots of scan and can live with low dpi, that would work fine too. And a lot cheaper than VueScan which is very far from free!
“for older hardware this is increasingly a part of the Linux experience too.” ???
whoa if true. citation needed. it would make a good story.