[sane-devel] UMAX Astra 610P on Debian Woody

[stef]

On Wed, Jul 09, 2003 at 12:56:01AM -0500, ahg at servidor.unam.mx wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'm writing to ask what's the best way (if there is a way) to use a UMAX Astra
> 610P scanner with Debian Woody.
> 
> This device is listed as "don't work (yet)" at
> http://panda.mostang.com/sane/sane-mfgs.html#UMAX
> 
> I guess I'm hoping that "don't work" might be a bit out of date and that there's
> _some_ way to make it work "now".
> 

	Due to lack of hardware to test, the 610P is barely detected, and is 
not operated by the umax_pp backend.

> I could...
> 
> ...install sane the latest SANE binaries as described at
> http://people.debian.org/~aurel32/sane.html
> 
> ...or 
> 
> ...get an unstable source of sane-umax_pp
> 
> ...or
> 
> ...anything else you might recommend.
> 
> I don't mind if there are a few hoops to jump through to get this working.
> However, the box and the scanner aren't mine, and I have to leave them in
> relatively good working order for non-techincal GNU/Linux newbies, so any
> solution has to be relatively low-maintenance.
> 
	The umax_pp backend is far from supporting the 610P model. It is likely
(but unproven) that is uses the same high-level commands than the 1220P/2000P.
But the main problem is that is doesn't use the EPP mode the same way. So all
low-level communication has to be reworked. Even though I have some logs of the
data flow between the scanner and windows under win98, it's not easy to 
implement. Such a thing can't be seriously done without having the hardware to 
test.

> Thanks in advance for your help,
> Andrew
> 
> P.S. If this works, will I be able to connect a printer to the scaner's "to
> printer" port?
> 
	I don't know for 610P, but for 1220P/200P, you don't have to do
anything special to have the 'pass-through' working. Currently, when the backend
uses the ppdev character device, it mitigates the trouble of using printer and
scanner at the same time. ie, you scan and print, printing waits for any scan
to complete before starting, but launching xsane or scanimage kills any printing
in progress.

> P.P.S. The machine also has Win 98 installed and the scanner works OK under that
> "operating system"... so I suppose I might be able to make it work under Wine...

	Only the windows 3.1 driver has a chance to work under wine since it
uses direct hardware access. They are some infos in wine on how to achieve this.
Newer drivers for win 9x use a VxD, so will never work under wine.

> though if that's the way to go I'd appreciate one or two brief pointers as to
> where to start... Thanks again.
> 

Regards,
	Stef