Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[bugman]

It's the only thing keeping me from reformatting my windows drive. Well that, and figuring out what to do with my book database on Access, but I can probably work that out with Gnumeric (Quisp? I'm not sure what it even does) and a little patience.

So, the scanner. Pup 1.06, xsane doesn't recognize it, can't figure out how to install the "fix" I found online (or the libieee 1284 either). I've been using Linux for a couple of days, sorry, but following the instructions and getting a "no acceptable C compiler found in $PATH" message is just plain confusing...

Any help accepted. Apart from "get a new scanner" as I am broke, broke, broke. And the scanner is the only thing keeping me from not paying the rent and not having a place to live. Thanks!

[BarryK]

I had a Canoscan parallel port scanner working with Xsane about a year ago. I don't recall the model number, but the one you gave is very familiar.
It just worked, I don't recall any problem.

[bugman]

I get a "No devices available" message. Clicking on "Help" gives me:

Possible reasons
1) There really is no device that is supported by SANE
2) Supported devices are busy
3) The permissions for the device file do not allow you to use it - try as root
4) The backend is not loaded by SANE (man sane-dll)
5) The backend is not configured correct (man sane-"backendname")
6) Possibly there is more than one SANE version installed

The first is part of the question, 2 and 3 are okay as far as I can tell, 4 and 5 I don't understand (I've been a Linux user for a few days now, but I tried xterming (is that a word?) the commands and Dillo came up and that was not helping, so...), and 6 should be okay, as I pupgot it just the once, SANE and the GUI.

Bill Gates, you still own my scanner. Aaarrrggghhh!

[bugman]

SOLVED!!! WOO HOO!!! WOOF!!! WOOF!!!

Okay, down boy...

From the SANE website:

To enable automatic detection of your scanner, uncomment the "canon_pp" line from /usr/local/etc/sane.d/dll.conf

Why it was commented out (only about 10 of the numerous scanners in the list were) I'll never know (I swear I never even saw the thing before, Ma!) but it is now fixed, it is working, and any other scanner-not-recognized questioners should check this file too.

Panting, happy puppy...

[bugman]

Except that it scans REALLY badly now, they're pretty much unusable. Parallel lines (no pun intended) running through the scan, even at high res. Why should this be different? The scanner still produces decent results in w98...

[BarryK]

Hmmm, maybe it's time to upgrade SANE!

[bugman]

I'm going to their site to see if there are any performance tweaks known to man or dog.

A problem I have with Xsane is configurability: my scanner's a piece of crap so I have to scan at at least 200 pixels-per-whatever. But I don't like to go over that as it kills my machine. Xsane goes from 150 (bad scans) to 300 (machine killer) with no in-between...

And then you scan, you save, you kill, you open an editor, you edit, you save again. Argh.

Tomorrow I download the Gimp! And there's a scan plug-in or two I'm going to try...

[bugman]

Maybe my scans aren't worse with SANE; maybe they're BETTER and I've only now realized just how godawful my scanner really is! I dunno...

[syzygy]

i've got a canon 640 Pex parallel port scanner that xsane couldn't see. every now & then i frig around with it to try & get it working, but no luck.

that is till i re-read this thread & saw bugman saying:-

To enable automatic detection of your scanner, uncomment the "canon_pp" line from /usr/local/etc/sane.d/dll.conf


i had done this before, but sane was installed in /etc/sane.d, so with simple link,

ln -s /etc/sane.d /usr/local/etc , finally got a working scanner.

this has probly been mentioned before but, sure is easy when you know how!