[sane-devel] sane SCSI 32bit emulation on 64bit

[Henning Meier-Geinitz]

Hi,

On 2006-01-09 09:54, Volker Kuhlmann wrote:
> 1) sane is an API for scanners which works
> 2) sane is *NOT* a scanning application, i.e. some software which gets
>    some scanning work done.

sane-backends is not. Frontends like scanimage, xscanimage and xsane
are.

> 3) xsane is a GUI around sane,

It's a frontend, not really "gui around sane".

>    but not a scanning application either,

Come on.

>    its results are useless. Take this as a fact which we can debate
>    elsewhere some other time. I am talking expensive film scanners here,
>    not some 0 8 15 flatbed.

I'm not sure if it's really xsane's fault or if backend support for
film scanners in sane(-backends) is just week.

> I can understand your attitude, and I can understand the vuescan
> author's attitude. Between the two, the net result is no functional
> scanning application is available for SCSI scanners on a 64bit Linux
> workstation. There goes "Linux is suitable for the desktop".

Linux works pretty well for my desktop (and other Unixes also do).
Actually my goal is to make SANE better, I don't really care that much
about Linux.

> You're doing an excellent job on the sane engine in the face of a lot of
> seriously annoying hardware manufactures. But to go places, it needs a
> car - a motor is absolutely necessary, but not sufficient.

Just to make one thing clear: Vuescan is NOT a SANE frontend. I.e. it
does not use any SANE backend. It's a completely independent program
with independent scanner drivers.

It just happens to use a part of the internal low level SANE code
(sanei_scsi). Last time I looked at it (some years ago), this was done
without even adhering to the license. Therefore it's really up to the
author to modify this code to his needs.

Nevertheless, if I had known a solution, I would have told you.

> If everything is compiled as 64bit, it works fine. Software which uses
> sanei_scsi and is compiled as 32bit is non-functional running on a 64bit
> architecture. This would be regardless of whether it's free open source
> software.

Abel posted a work-around for that.

Bye,
  Henning