[sane-devel] Epson 1640SU, no devices found, RH 8.0

[Henning Meier-Geinitz]

Hi,

I'm replying to the sane-devel mailing list as others may be also
interested.

On Fri, Dec 12, 2003 at 06:41:53AM +0100, Torben Andersen wrote:
> >Which version of SANE do you use (scanimage --version)?
> >
>    [root at 0x50a44fb6 toran]# scanimage --version
>    scanimage (sane-backends) 1.0.13; backend version 1.0.2
> 
> I don't understand the backend version (1.0.2) as I installed 1.0.13 
> from RPM.

The first version number is the version of scanimage (the frontend).
The second one is the version of the backend it is linked to. Usually
the frontends are linked to "libsane.so". You can check that with 
"ldd /usr/bin/scanimage" (modify the path if necessary).

> Howcome thereis no debuginformation ? Last time I did that, it printed a 
> whole lot.
> 
> I also tried "strace scanimage -L >strace.txt 2>&1" and the output is 
> here: strace.txt 
> <http://home19.inet.tele.dk/torben_andersen/strace.txt>. It tries 
> without luck to use v4linux, whatever that is !
> 
> Any clues ?

Yes. I've gotten one similar report. I guess it's a bug in the RPM.

Here is an explanation on what happens:

Usually the frontends are linked to libsane.so. It's located in
/usr/lib/. This is the so-called "dll" backend which loads all the
other SANE backends like libsane-epson.so. Those backends are located
in /usr/lib/sane/. For some unknown reason in your RPM there is a
/usr/lib/sane/libsane.so and that one is the one used by scanimage.
For yet another unknown reason that file is libsane-v4l.so in reality.
That's the backend for video for linux (video cards). So when you rund
scanimage, only the v4l backend is loaded. You can only use video
cards, no scanners or other devices.

Short summary: your RPM is broken. 

SANE itself (as on our website) does NOT link to
/usr/lib/sane/libsane.so and does NOT even contain
/usr/lib/sane/libsane.so.

So the soultion is to use a working RPM. Don't ask me who broke the
RPM, it's not us at least :-)

Bye,
  Henning