[sane-devel] where to put firmware files?

[Henning Meier-Geinitz]

Hi,

On Sat, Oct 05, 2002 at 06:54:17PM +0200, Till Kamppeter wrote:
> Another idea: One could perhaps even put some mechanism/tool into SANE 
> which extracts firmware files from Windows driver CDs or from Windows 
> driver packages provided on the internet automatically by using 
> "cabextract" (http://www.kyz.uklinux.net/cabextract.php3) and "unzip" to 
> browse the packages and to extract the files and adding the names and 
> paths of the needed firmware files in the driver packages and also the 
> names and the URLs of the driver packages in a database included in the 
> sane-backends package. Then a scanner setup program could ask the user 
> for the Windows driver CD or download from the web and then the firmware 
> will be copied onto the user's hard disk so that SANE can upload it when 
> initializing the scanner.

The main problem is that I haven't found any way to extract the files.
I tried unzip, cabextract, and i6comp but nothing was able to extract
the firmware from the windows binaries. These aren't simple
self-extracting zip files but a complete installation program with the
twain drivers, firmware, documentation in one single file.

Maybe this firmware-download on-demand is an idea for the
distributions' scanner tools.

It would be easier if we could place the firmware files on a webserver
somewhere. Or if someone writes a GPLed frimware :-)

Bye,
  Henning