On Monday 16 April 2001 19:55, you wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Apr 2001 20:16:51 +0100
>
> Nigel Feltham <nigel.feltham@libertysurf.co.uk> wrote:
> > Some SCSI scanners can already be used under WINE running windows twain
> > applications using an emulated ASPI layer and Printer port scanners work
> > by allowing SANE to allow windows apps to directly access printer port -
> > if this can be made to work for USB as well and a SANE wrapper could be
> > written to appear to the Linux Frontend as a normal SANE device and to
> > the Windows Twain driver as a Standard Windows Twain application then the
> > only difference to the user between a true SANE backend and a windows
> > Driver using the SANE wrapper would be having 2 dialogs displayed (the
> > SANE scan dialog and the TWAIN scan dialog) but many windows twain
> > drivers can have their scan dialog bypassed.
>
> Oy. The above sure sounds ugly to me. I do not use windows or even own a
> copy of windows. The above describes a Lindows installation with layer
> after layer of drivers and emulations... If you gonna do this why even use
> Linux?
>
Yes, it is an ugly solution but when you have switched from windows to Linux
and discovered it's far superior to windows in many ways but your scanner no
longer works and the manufacturer is unwilling to supply data needed to write
a native linux driver then this is the only solution - and has the advantage
of making all incompatible scanners work after only writing one piece of code
(the emulation layer could even have a logging option to allow the commands
sent from twain driver to the hardware to be learnt to assist in writing a
real driver).
The only other alternatives are to either replace your hardware with linux
compatible kit or dual-boot into windows everytime you want to scan
something. Given the choice I'd rather have a working kludge to use on linux
than choose one of these alternative solutions - I am one of the lucky few
who has a linux compatble scanner (mustek 600cp, not supported as standard
but a patch is available for standard mustek backend to make it work) but I
am thinking of the many people who would switch to linux but don't just
because their hardware isn't supported - of course then they'll find their
crappy winmodem won't work either but at least we'll be getting there.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Apr 16 2001 - 13:41:04 PDT