[sane-devel] Sane with Brother MFC-9880

[Henning Meier-Geinitz]

Hi,

On Sat, Oct 08, 2005 at 06:04:51PM +0200, Risanecek wrote:
> I would like to contribute feedback for this device, but can't get it to
> run.

The scanner search engine knows the following about this scanner:

http://www.sane-project.org/cgi-bin/driver.pl?manu=brother&model=9880&bus=any

So the status of this scanner is untested, which means that it may or
may not work. The backend is "brother" which is not part of the
sane-backends distribution.

> > scanimage -L
> device `brother:bus2;dev1' is a Brother MFC-9880 MFC Scanner
> 
> (works for both user and root)

Have you also tried scanning with scanimage (just to be sure)?

> => Failed to open device 'brother:bus2;dev1': Error during device I/O

I haven't checked if that works with the brother backend, but do the
debug messages show anything helpful? Usually you turn them on like
this:

SANE_DEBUG_BACKENDNAME=255 scanimage >/dev/null

where BACKENDNAME could be e.g. BROTHER. If there is a manpage for
this backend, it may be mentioned how to enable debugging.

> tried also to compile the brscan sources myself.
> 
> Unfortunately no luck :-(
> 
> make[1]: Entering directory `/tmp/brother-1.0.0/sanei'
> rm -f .libs/sanei_scsi.lo
> gcc -c -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I. -I../include -I../include -D_GNU_SOURCE
> -DPATH_SANE_CONFIG_DIR=/usr/etc/sane.d -DPATH_SANE_DATA_DIR=/usr/share
> -DV_MAJOR=1 -DV_MINOR=0 -g -O2 -W -Wall sanei_scsi.c -fPIC -DPIC -o
> .libs/sanei_scsi.lo
> sanei_scsi.c: In function 'sanei_scsi_req_enter2':
> sanei_scsi.c:1919: error: invalid lvalue in assignment
> sanei_scsi.c:1933: error: invalid lvalue in assignment

Looks like Brother uses quite old code. In both lines, remove "(const
void*)" and compile again. After this change, the code compiles for me.

> Resumee: "Scanner Access Now Easy" I must confess my interpretation
> of "easy" differs somewhat.

Blame Brother. It's their backend and SANE developers can only give
limited help because that backend contains non-free binary-only code.
So their support is the right address for problems with the backend.

Please tell us if after the change that scanner works so I can update
the status for it.

Bye,
  Henning