# Re: Opinion about SCSI scanner with FreeBSD

Kevin Charter (charter@cs.ualberta.ca)
Thu, 18 Nov 1999 16:56:00 -0700 (MST)

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> On Thu, 18 Nov 1999, German Jose Gomez Garcia wrote:
>
> > I had bought and AGFA Snapscan 1236 SCSI, and it was my worst
> > nightmare. I own a Supermicro P6DBU (dual PII + U2W SCSI) and I was not
...
> --> I'm having problems too, but I have to think it's the SANE driver
> that's broken, not the scanner. It works flawlessly for me under Win95
> on either of the adapters I've tried it on. (Granted, it's the only SCSI
> device in my system.) I originally bought it because it got much better
> reviews for image quality than the similarly-priced UMAX scanners.
>
> I agree, though, that if you want to use a scanner under FreeBSD, you'd be
> better off buying one that's already supported well. I'm not sure when
> (if ever) the Agfa back end will be fixed.

It may well be the backend that is broken. A lot of people with earlier
AGFA scanners use it without the problems that 1236s users sometimes
report. It could be that the 1236s is not really compatible with
the 300/310/600 models; unfortunately, I haven't been able to obtain
programming documentation for the 1236s, so I have no reference for
what the differences between it and previous AGFA models are (and
advertising blurbs don't do the trick). I also don't own a 1236s,
and I'm not likely to any time soon, so I can't even experiment
with it.

Of course, it could also be that the backend is doing something
weird with SCSI commands (for example, the problem with the new
generic scsi driver occurred because the main process and the
child process forked for reading both tried to talk to the
scanner). But I really don't do anything esoteric with SCSI. I just
use the sane SCSI functions as they were intended, AFAIK. I can check
that I'm not writing outside buffers and that kind of thing, but
that's about it. Perhaps part of the problem is that some of the
AGFA-specific stuff in the commands has changed for the 1236s.

I'll keep trying to work on it, and keep trying to get documentation.
But in the interim, the 1236s can't be said to be officially supported in
the backend. I'll put a disclaimer to that effect on the website.

Kevin

    --
    Kevin Charter
    charter@cs.rice.edu | charter@cs.ualberta.ca
    http://www.cs.rice.edu/~charter | http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~charter

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