Re: SnapScan firmware for SANE.

Conrad Knauer wrote:
> Was that the Agfa Snapscan I gave Scott?

Could be; Scott lent it to me for scanning.

> The reason I passed it on to him was precisely because of that dopey
> binary blob; I contacted Agfa and they aren't willing (able?) to allow
> further redistribution of it and I didn't switch to Ubuntu from XP for
> things that 'just don't work' out of the box ;)

Yea, you'd think copyright on a piece of software that's tied to
hardware would be a bit more flexible. Apple lets people download MacOS
System 7 pretty freely (after all, how else will you run an old LC475
[that isn't a BSD or Linux]?). Why not the firmware you need to use the
hardware the companies sold you already?

> (I've come to be picky about hardware... If one is looking for a

Never a poor habit to have; I'm a lot more satisfied by not getting
random crap hardware :)

> scanner http://www.sane-project.org/sane-mfgs.html is a good guide,
> though it doesn't mention the firmware issue with some scanners; find
> the ones that have "Complete" support and you'll likely be happy...
> Like I am with my Canon LiDE 30 that I brought in for show-and-tell to
> a meeting a few months ago :)
>
> As it says on http://www.agfa.com/en/co/support/scanners/index.jsp you
> can still get those driver files on
> http://static.agfa.com/digicam_scanner_drivers/ (though its a bit of a
> pain since you have to download a large EXE and then run cabextract as
> I recall to grab the BIN file particular to your model... that site
> you mentioned is certainly far easier, I will grant you that ;)
>

The drivers I got from Agfa were less than useful. On the Mac side,
they have a DMG of an old Classic-based/OS X wrapped thing that won't
work on my machine. On the Windows side, it's a simple TWAIN driver
that didn't pop a .bin file out anywhere I could find. On the Mac side,
browsing into the .app package and seaching yielded no bin file. I was
very happy when I found a website with the files available already.

One nice thing about OS X being based on Unix is that it can use CUPS
and SANE internally, benefiting from the printer/scanner support of
Linux. I could, in theory, use Intel-compiled SANE on my laptop with
the same easy support as I had on my Linux desktop, except I'd have to
fink install sane (+dependencies) first. Ubuntu has everything
installed by default, reducing my work to finding firmware.
Received on Thu Aug 16 04:25:49 2007