[sane-devel] SANE scanimage unable to connect to third party (backend) driver: brscan3

[Ralph Little]

Hi Don,
Someone here very recently had exactly the same problem with the brother3
backend driver from Brother.
Basically, their backend is very good, but things have moved on in the
Linux world since it was built by them which has introduced some
incompatibilities.

There are a number of issues:

1) Linux Mint (and Ubuntu upon which it is based) puts its
platform-specific shared objects in a different place. So the installed
shared objects cannot be found. The package puts them in /usr/lib64 whereas
Ubuntu/Mint expects them in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu. You can add symbolic
links in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu to the files installed into /usr/lib64.
One way is:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib64/sane /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/sane

2) libusb has changed. The package needs an old version, which is still
available in the repo. Try this:

sudo apt install libusb-0.1-4

OK, so now you should be able to see a device from scanimage -L. The device
class is called "brother3" not "brscan3" BTW.

I just worked through this sequence on my fresh install and it seems to
work for me.

Let us know how you get on.

Cheers,
Ralph

On Wed, May 21, 2025 at 8:29 AM Don Pitcher via sane-devel <
sane-devel at alioth-lists.debian.net> wrote:

> Hello SANE-dev ,
>
>
> I am troubleshooting a problem with SANE scanimage unable connect to a
> third party driver (backend). I have exhausted all resources that I know of
> to solve this problem. Could you take a moment to review my post on the
> Linux Mint forum to help guide me to a helpful resource?
>
>
> $ sudo scanimage -d brscan3 -T
> Output format is not set, using pnm as a default.
> scanimage: open of device brscan3 failed: Invalid argument
>
>
> https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?p=2632488#p2632488
>
>
> Thank you,
>
> Don, aka: sk8board
>
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