[sane-devel] brother MFC-295CN Xsane fails to detect scanner:

[Ralph Little]

Hi,
This model was released around 2009 so it is one of the older machines.
You really have two options at this point.

1) install Brother's scanner driver. They do have a Linux driver on their
website that mostly works although they don't update them very often and
some people have trouble on new distributions related to dependencies or in
the case of Ubuntu derivatives, issues with the placement of libraries.

2) You could try our brother_mfp backend which is currently in development.
For some people, it works good enough. It is USB only at this stage, but if
you are interested I can help you set it up. Some details here:
https://gitlab.com/sane-project/backends/-/merge_requests/751
Let me know.

Cheers,
Ralph

On Sat, Feb 7, 2026 at 4:58 PM Paul Graff via sane-devel <
sane-devel at alioth-lists.debian.net> wrote:

> I am wondering if I could get some help debugging the following output.
> The MFC-295CN has wonderful print but I simply cannot get it to scan.
>
> :~ # !2918
> SANE_DEBUG_DLL=4 scanimage -L
> [18:34:54.946643] [sanei_debug] Setting debug level of dll to 4.
> [18:34:54.946865] [dll] sane_init: SANE dll backend version 1.0.13 from
> sane-backends 1.2.1
> [18:34:54.946930] [dll] sane_init/read_dlld: attempting to open
> directory `./dll.d'
> [18:34:54.946992] [dll] sane_init/read_dlld: attempting to open
> directory `/etc/sane.d/dll.d'
> [18:34:54.947067] [dll] sane_init/read_dlld: using config directory
> `/etc/sane.d/dll.d'
> [18:34:54.947156] [dll] add_backend: adding backend `hpaio'
> [18:34:54.947177] [dll] add_backend: adding backend `airscan'
> [18:34:54.947228] [dll] add_backend: adding backend `net'
> [18:34:54.947238] [dll] add_backend: adding backend `escl'
> [18:34:54.947261] [dll] add_backend: adding backend `genesys'
> [18:34:54.947286] [dll] add_backend: adding backend `brother3'
> [18:34:54.947329] [dll] sane_get_devices
> [18:34:54.947338] [dll] load: searching backend `brother3' in
> `/usr/lib64/sane'
> [18:34:54.947346] [dll] load: trying to load
> `/usr/lib64/sane/libsane-brother3.so.1'
> [18:34:54.947360] [dll] load: dlopen()ing
> `/usr/lib64/sane/libsane-brother3.so.1'
> [18:34:54.947670] [dll] load: dlopen() failed (libusb-0.1.so.4: cannot
> open shared object file: No such file or directory)
> [18:34:54.947687] [dll] load: searching backend `genesys' in
> `/usr/lib64/sane'
> [18:34:54.947696] [dll] load: trying to load
> `/usr/lib64/sane/libsane-genesys.so.1'
> [18:34:54.947710] [dll] load: dlopen()ing
> `/usr/lib64/sane/libsane-genesys.so.1'
> [18:34:54.951153] [dll] init: initializing backend `genesys'
> [18:34:55.100366] [dll] init: backend `genesys' is version 1.0.0
> [18:34:55.101524] [dll] load: searching backend `escl' in `/usr/lib64/sane'
> [18:34:55.101572] [dll] load: trying to load
> `/usr/lib64/sane/libsane-escl.so.1'
> [18:34:55.101625] [dll] load: dlopen()ing
> `/usr/lib64/sane/libsane-escl.so.1'
> [18:34:55.144314] [dll] init: initializing backend `escl'
> [18:34:55.145657] [dll] init: backend `escl' is version 1.0.0
> [18:34:56.161087] [dll] load: searching backend `net' in `/usr/lib64/sane'
> [18:34:56.161160] [dll] load: trying to load
> `/usr/lib64/sane/libsane-net.so.1'
> [18:34:56.161234] [dll] load: dlopen()ing
> `/usr/lib64/sane/libsane-net.so.1'
> [18:34:56.167294] [dll] init: initializing backend `net'
> [18:34:56.184376] [dll] init: backend `net' is version 1.2.1
> [18:35:02.353491] [dll] load: searching backend `airscan' in
> `/usr/lib64/sane'
> [18:35:02.353565] [dll] load: trying to load
> `/usr/lib64/sane/libsane-airscan.so.1'
> [18:35:02.353640] [dll] load: dlopen()ing
> `/usr/lib64/sane/libsane-airscan.so.1'
> [18:35:02.382769] [dll] init: initializing backend `airscan'
> [18:35:02.385931] [dll] init: backend `airscan' is version 1.0.0
> [18:35:03.396824] [dll] load: searching backend `hpaio' in
> `/usr/lib64/sane'
> [18:35:03.396898] [dll] load: trying to load
> `/usr/lib64/sane/libsane-hpaio.so.1'
> [18:35:03.396973] [dll] load: dlopen()ing
> `/usr/lib64/sane/libsane-hpaio.so.1'
> [18:35:03.401716] [dll] init: initializing backend `hpaio'
> [18:35:03.402156] [dll] init: backend `hpaio' is version 1.0.0
> [18:35:03.424671] [dll] sane_get_devices: found 0 devices
>
> And:
>
> :/usr/lib64 # ls -lah | grep libnsl.so.1
> lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root    18 Feb  7 16:47 libnsl.so.1 ->
> /lib64/libnsl.so.3
> :/usr/lib64 #
>
> Is the MFC-295CN simply to old to be able to scan well anymore?
> -Thank you for any thoughts on this.
>
>
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