[sane-devel] Umax Astra 2400S w/ AEC-6712D hanging

[abel deuring]

DN Dunham schrieb:
> I've been trying to figure this one out for a few months now on my own 
> and thought perhaps someone there might be able to help me.

Well, I hope did not wait so long posting your question because this 
mailing list appars to bite ;)

> 
> The Problem:
> I have an old desktop from a mom and pop shop that I have slowly been 
> upgrading over the years. About a year ago, I started using Linux RedHat 
> on it. The problem is that not everything works under Linux. Right now, 
> I have three pieces of hardware I can't get to work on the desktop and 
> the most pressing need is for the scanner. Besides a few games, its the 
> only real reason we ever boot-up into Windows.  Anyways....
> 
> The scanner is a Umax Astra 2400S that I bought from CDW is 1998. CDW it 
> appears changed out the SCSI card that was included in the package to an 
> ACARD AEC-6712D.  This caused a few problems under Windows even, but I 
> found drivers to get it to work. I now run Linux RedHat 9.0 on my 
> system. RedHat 9 is able to detect both the card and the scanner. It 
> assigns a driver atp870u to the card. However, SANE (via xsane 0.89) is 
> unable to interface with the scanner.
> 
> After first boot, SANE will detect that the scanner is there and allow 
> me to try and scan from it. It will actually detect the scanner in two 
> places (/dev/sg0 and /dev/scanner). However, if I do try and scan with 
> either, SANE will hang. I seem to recall that sometimes the scanner 
> appears to do things, but most of the time it doesn't (as in the test I 
> did right now trying to get a preview).
> 
> After attempting to do anything the the scanner and having a failure, 
> the scanner is no longer recognized by the system until reboot. Not even 
> RedHat's hardware browser will see it there.
> 
> According to the Sane website, the UMAX ASTRA 2400S is supported, but 
> most of this seems to be with other SCSI cards. I suspect that that may 
> be my problem yet the SCSI card itself also seems to be supported by the 
> atp870u driver. Thus, I'm not sure what to do or how to fix the problem.

Yes, the Linux atp870u driver has/had a bug, which appears only for a 
few SCSI commands, so the scanner is at first recognzed, but some Sane 
backends issue commands that raise the bug. Some time ago, I tried to 
find a maintainer for this driver to report the bug and a fix, but there 
does not seem to exist any maintainer... So I suspect that the bug 
exists even in recent kernels.

IIRC, fixing the bug was easy, it just requires to change 2 or 3 source 
code lines. So you could recompile the atp870u driver. I you want to do 
that, let me know -- I'll search old emails to find the fix. But if you 
have never before compiled a Linux kernel, that might be a small 
adventure ;)

> Can anyone give me any advice, info or (even better yet) a workable 
> solution? I'd prefer not to buy another SCSI card, but if it comes to it 
> I am willing.

Well, I think that it would be worth at least to test another (perhaps 
borrowed) adapter. From my experience, adapters for the sym53c8xx and 
the aic7xxx drivers work very well. And if you can't borrow an adapter, 
you can get used ones at Ebay for a few Dollar/Euro. (the postage can 
actually be higher than the purchase price itself...)

Abel