[ANNOUNCE] New backend for Abaton scanners

David Huggins-Daines (bn711@freenet.carleton.ca)
Wed, 18 Nov 1998 22:22:26 -0500

Abaton made several models of scanners in the late '80s and early '90s
before they went out of business. Everex, the parent company of Abaton,
still keeps drivers around on their FTP site, but they are unsupported,
and Macintosh-only, as far as I can tell.

Anyway, I happen to own one of them, and since I wanted to be able to
acquire images without having to use the MacOS and accompanying non-free
software, I decided that it was time to roll up my sleeves, install
MacsBug, and start reverse-engineering the sucker so that I could use
it with the GIMP on my Linux box.

Well, after some late-night hacking sessions, I've got a working SANE
backend for at least one model of Abaton flatbed scanner.

The code (abaton.c and abaton.h) is at http://www.debian.org/~dhd/sane/.
You'll have to move it into the backends/ directory in the SANE source
tree, add "abaton" to the PRELOADABLE_BACKENDS variable in Makefile.in,
along with these two dependencies further down:

libsane-abaton.la: ../sanei/sanei_constrain_value.lo
libsane-abaton.la: ../sanei/sanei_scsi.lo

Then re-run configure, make, ane make install... Probably also add it to
/usr/local/etc/sane.d/dll.conf, as well.

Since there is no programming information available, I can't affirm that
this backend will work on any models other than the 300/GS (which is the
one I own) at the moment. It looks as if the interface is the same for
all of the ones supported by the particular Mac driver I've got, which
includes 300/S, the 300/GS, and maybe another one, so you probably won't
crash the SCSI bus if you use it with one of them, but you'll get "Operation
not supported" errors if you try to scan in grayscale or halftone modes.

If anyone has one of the other Abaton scanners, and would like to see it
become supported by this backend, please contact me. In particular, I'm
looking for people with the color models, since they're likely to be more
different from the 300/GS than the 300/S is.

Cheers

P.S. How do I go about getting it included in the SANE distribution?

-- 
          David Huggins-Daines - bn711@freenet.carleton.ca
           PGP public key #63A8B719 on public key servers
    fingerprint=4F 38 A2 34 E1 E0 B7 6E  C3 DA 6C E3 C6 6A 05 62



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