[sane-devel] On a clear day... You can see my scanner! (Edited from my business email)

[Steven R Alexander]

Hi all,
I know I am new to this list so I just hope that I am in the right place 
for this! I have used several versions of Ubuntu over the last few years 
and must admit that since switching to Linux from windows writing code 
sometimes leaves me clueless. However, Linux is far too good to pass up 
and return to the nightmare of restrictions that windows offers in its 
licences. My problem is that only half of my computer wants to see my 
scanner. This is a CanoScan N340P making it a parallel port version. 
(Some how thinking in retrospect that USB would have been better at the 
time!) My version of Ubuntu is Hardy heron... at one time this year I 
was up to date with Jaunty Jackalope but ran into some serious bugs 
which is of course another story! Anyway, My version of Hardy has wine 
installed and just to make things a little more confusing my computer is 
dual boot with an old windows program that I use for the things wine 
won't run. Now, My version of wine is pretty good as it has Direct X, 
Microsoft .Net and a few other programs in it.

As I mentioned, my problem is that my old version of Windows (98 s/e) 
has no trouble seeing my scanner and it works like a charm, but Linux 
cannot see my parallel port let alone my scanner! I installed the 
current version of Sane 1.0.19 from the Ubuntu repository along with the 
extras package for good measure, but no joy. Given that I have wine 
emulating XP and a whole host of goodies in there, I added the Canon 
software since I have been to the internet using wine before among other 
things. However it just thinks about it, then throws the error code 
"0x00070800" back at me telling me it couldn't find it. In frustration, 
I added the device manager to my system tools to see if I could find the 
problem. I noticed an unknown device listed, but try as I may can't find 
out what it is. It reports as a serial platform device 8250 but that is 
as far as it got. I decided to replace my version of Sane with a more up 
to date stable version and have another go with Linux. I downloaded Sane 
1.0.20 and as of this afternoon spent most of it after reading both the 
install instructions and the readme, to install it. Alas I admit I am 
not good with computer code even though I have had some limited success 
in the past installing using the terminal! Adobe Reader, Real Player and 
a few others show that some times things do work the way they are 
intended. This afternoon however was not one of them... I copied the 
text below from the terminal which seems to tell me that something is 
missing from the tar. Try as I may I got no joy at all and a pair of 
tired sore eyes for my trouble.

I don't know if something is missing from the tar or from my computer, 
but I wanted to show someone what my efforts ended up with in the hope 
someone else will see what went wrong...

root at highland-dreamweaver:~/sane-backends-1.0.20# ./configure; make; 
make install
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
checking for a thread-safe mkdir -p... /bin/mkdir -p
checking for gawk... no
checking for mawk... mawk
checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes
checking whether to enable maintainer-specific portions of Makefiles... no
checking build system type... I686-pc-Linux-gnulibc1
checking host system type... I686-pc-Linux-gnulibc1
checking for gcc... gcc
checking for C compiler default output file name...
configure: error: in `/root/sane-backends-1.0.20':
configure: error: C compiler cannot create executables
See `config.log' for more details.
make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found.  Stop.
make: *** No rule to make target `install'.  Stop.
root at highland-dreamweaver:~/sane-backends-1.0.20#


I hope someone can assist me here as this is extremely frustrating. So 
far the score is Windows - 1 Linux - 0 Wine -  0. I need to turn that 
around as Linux is my primary OS.

Thanks all,
Steve...