HP is one of the companies that give (almost) continuous support to their products for Linux environments.
I was interested in having my Multifunction machine (fax copy print scan) be used as a scanner in my Linux laptop but so far nothing was successful.
Tonight I discovered that the latest version of hplip released by HP (is hplip-3.9.2) is supporting this machine which has high performance on printing speed. While I have Ubuntu 8.10 installed it seems that the version of hplip coming with is rather old and does not have the necessary drivers for XSane support (scanner in Linux). I suggest that you download and install the latest version from HP Linux Imaging and Printing
You download the file hplip-3.9.2.run which you have to convert it to executable (chmod +x hplip....) and then run it (./hplip....) Follow the instructions and save your day ;-)