Fix Ubuntu Document Scanner "Document Feeder Empty" Problem

Introduction

My 10-year old HP OfficeJet 4650 All-in-One Printer finally broke down recently, and I got a new HP OfficeJet Pro 8125e All-in-One Printer to replace it. I have set up the new printer on my Ubuntu 26.04 LTS desktop, and it works well for printing. However, I encountered a problem when I tried to use the Document Scanner to scan on the new printer.

In this blog post, I would like to quickly share a solution to fix the problem of the Document Scanner on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.

The “Document Feeder Empty” Problem

On Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, the Document Scanner installed by default is actually the Simple Scan application which can be installed via

$ sudo apt install simple-scan

When I tried to use the Document Scanner on my new HP OfficeJet Pro 8125e All-in-One Printer, I encountered a problem where the Document Scanner would always show “Document Feeder Empty”, which completely makes no sense.

It turns out that fixing the “Document Feeder Empty” problem is actually very simple. Just run the following command once in the terminal and the problem will be fixed permanently.

$ simple-scan --debug

References

• Sane “Failed to scan - document feeder empty”