Problems with SANE 0.74 for OS/2

Tobias Ernst (tobi@bland.fido.de)
Fri, 23 Oct 1998 10:24:30 +0200

Hallo Yuri!

I nohup'ed a GNU wget process on a Unix box at my university during this night,
and now I finally have your sane 0.74 distribution archive. I see that you
included a difference file containing all your changes on the source code.
Thank you very much!

As for the good news, I managed to address my scanner using your build. As for
the bad news, there were several problems.

Here is all information I think could be valuable:

1) Config.Sys:

BASEDEV=AHA152X.ADD /V
BASEDEV=OS2SCSI.DMD
BASEDEV=OS2ASPI.DMD
DEVICE=E:\LOCAL\IMPOS21\CPASPI.SYS
device=d:\os2\boot\aspirout.sys

CPASPI.SYS is the Impos/2 driver, to this date my only possibility to
scan on OS/2 - but I don't think it should interfere with aspirout.sys.
At least, both load without any complaint.

The aspirout.sys in \os2\boot is still the one that was shipped with 0.72.

2) I unzipped sane074b1.zip to e:\home\x

3) I changed to e:\home\x\bin and started find_scanner. Here comes the first
queer result:

find-scanner: found scanner " Scanner 600A4 2.21" at device b0t0l0
find-scanner: found scanner " Scanner 600A4 2.21" at device b0t1l0
[and so on, until:]
find-scanner: found scanner " Scanner 600A4 2.21" at device b3t7l0

The scanner identification string is correct (Sane on FreeBSD reports
the same one), but I really don't have 32 scanners attached to this
system ;-).

As the scanner is attached to the first (only) SCSI controller at SCSI
ID 4, I then edited e:\home\x\conf to only contain a single line:

b0t4l0

4) I then did
SET SANE_CONFIG_DIR=e:/home/x/conf

5) I changed to e:\home\x\bin and tried scanimage --help. Result:

[...]

List of available devices:
pnm:0 pnm:1 microtek2:b0t4l0

Process terminated by SIGSEGV
core dumped
SYS1808:
Der Prozeß wurde gestoppt. Der Softwarediagnosecode
(Fehlercode der Ausnahmebedingung) ist 0005.

If you did keep a debugging version of this build, I can send you the
core file if you wish.

"scanimage -d microtek2:b0t4l0 --help" did work, however.

6) I then scanned my first image on the command line. The scan speed was
roughly equal to that of ImpOS/2. However, just like with ImpOS/2, my
computer is hardly usable during the scan progress. It is not completely
blocked (i.E. I can switch through windows every two seconds or so), but
it is even unusable for tasks as simple as entering a text.

Is this normal behaviour? Or is it related to a driver problem of my
machine? If it is normal, do you think it could be changed? I suspect
that the problem is somewhere in the ASPI driver layer - perhaps one
would have to write a multithreaded aspirout.sys in order to circumvent
this problem ... ?

7) As for the Sane/2 frontend:

* Please make it possible to enter numbers into the dialog fields
like resolution etc. Pressing and holding the PgUp-Button until the
field has scrolled to the desired number is very boring.

* The frontend seems to start up on a hard-coded position. This is
a) bad behaviour in general, and b) the hard-coded position is such
that the title bar is ouside the physical screen on my 800x600 display
...

* Most of the input boxes (like Halftoning) are not wide enough to
display the text that is in them. Please give them some more space.

* When scanning with the frontend in 24 bit mode, the colors are wrong.
This is not so when scanning with the command line.

* The frontend complains about the --resolution failing with "invalid
argument", no matter what resolution I enter. (All these resolutions
work on the command line).

But again thanks for your work, and take this as positive critic! I surely want
to help you making Sane the best scan interface for OS/2. :-).

Viele Grüße,
Tobias

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