[sane-devel] Sane with Samsung CLX-3170fn

[Michael Whapples]

Hello,

I recently purchased a Samsung CLX-3170fn and I would like to report 
some of my findings with it and possibly to get some advice on how I may 
make it work better with sane.

First of all as stated in its specification it is supposedly supported 
under linux and sure enough there are linux drivers supplied on the 
driver CD and on the Samsung website, so I decided to install the 
Samsung drivers. Unfortunately it didn't work fully as I would hope, 
when I scan with scanimage the scanner performs the scan but scanimage 
comes up with a warning: "scanimage: WARNING: read more data than 
announced by backend" and the message is followed by two numbers 
(assumeably the announce data amount and actual read data amount). When 
I try and use the image data in another application it tends to fail to 
use the image (eg. performing OCR using ocrad gives a message "ocrad: 
end-of-file reading from pnm file.").

Reading around on the internet has lead to no answer to solve this and 
when I contacted Samsung support I basically got a reply saying they 
don't provide support for their Linux drivers. One thing I can confirm 
is that my installation of sane is working fine as I can use a HP 
scanner on the same computer.

Whilst searching for a solution to the Samsung driver issue I noticed 
that some comments said that Samsung and some Xerox devices work in a 
similar way so I decided to see if I could get the Xerox driver supplied 
with sane to work with my Samsung CLX-3170fn, so I added the USB 
information to the /etc/sane.d/xerox_mfp.conf file. As far as I can tell 
this seems to work (I am visually impaired so can't visually check the 
scanned image but I am able to use the images for OCR) with one slight 
bug. It appears that using the xerox_mfp driver scanadf doesn't detect 
the paper state in the document feeder, so from what I have experienced 
either the device crashes (emitting a long beep from the speaker) and 
restarts or scanadf keeps adding images for extra pages (although the 
ADF doesn't try to take more paper). Also I thing the Samsung driver may 
have had some extra options (eg. --page-format so that you could set the 
page by the paper size name).

So what could be done to support this device properly under Linux?

My system configuration (at least what I think is relevant):
Debian unstable (updated to the latest packages at the weekend)
Sane from debian packages (eg. libsane=1.0.10-4)
Device connected through USB
Samsung drivers 3.00.37 (although the ones on the driver CD also came up 
with the same warning).

Any help would be appreciated

Michael Whapples