[sane-devel] Sane with Brother MFC-9880

[Risanecek]

Hi Henning,

On 10/9/05, Henning Meier-Geinitz <henning at meier-geinitz.de> wrote:

> 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.


I knew that. Therefore I wrote that I'd like to give the feedback which is
asked for in the docs you referenced.

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


Of course. I/O Error

SANE_DEBUG_BACKENDNAME=255 scanimage >/dev/null


The brother backend seems not to provide any debug messages.

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


Ok - this worked. libsane-brother.so.1.0.7 also differs somewhat in length
from the binary in the RPM package, unfortunately after installation
things are somewhat worse in that now not even a device is found.
(by scanimage -L, sane-find-scanners does find something)

Just for my understanding: What is the correct device identification:

brother:/dev/usbscanner
libusb:002:003
brother:bus2;dev1; <--- have this here but never seen it in documentation

???

> 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.


I issued a support query to brother - let's see how/when they react.
As for the "blaming": My advice for the sane developers is to mentally
take a less "vendor bashing" position.

E.g. paragraph 2.7 of the Sane FAQ is IMHO not justified for brother,
because
telling " Other vendors actively ignore anything that is not Windows thus
limiting the sales of their scanners." is quite pathetic with the presence
of these pages:
http://solutions.brother.com/linux/sol/printer/linux/sane_drivers.html

Also, this device does work perfectly in our Linux network, because it
sends the scans as attachements in emails to the users who request them.
Which is sufficient. I just wanted to test sane - years after my first test
-
to see what value-add it would bring today.

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


I'll poke around with it and let you know.

Bye,
Richard
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