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Re: HP ScanJet Plus + Debian 2.0 (fwd)



Ray, Thanks for the input.  Some things are making a lot more sense
here.  I'll make comments below.

On Wed, 7 Oct 1998,  Raymond A. Ingles wrote:

> On Wed, 7 Oct 1998, Bedrock LAN Administrator wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Greetings folx.  I have an old HP ScanJet Plus connected to my
> > parallel port that I cannot seem to get working with Debian 2.0 no
> > matter what I try.  
> 
>  If it's the scanner I'm thinking of (8bit grayscale scanner) it needs a
> proprietary interface card to function, which isn't much like a
> parallel port, except for the cable. Does it work with DOS/Windows?

DOS?  Whassat?  Winders?  Whassat?  *smirk* Seriously, though, I'm
afraid that I can't test this scanner under either DOS or Windows,
since I ditched all of that over a year ago (ain't it great to be
MS-Free?  visit www.i-want-a-website.com)
 
>  The ScanJet Plus is not listed as one of the supported scanners at the
> SANE website. I'm pretty sure you're going to have a lot of trouble
> getting this to work. You may have to write a driver yourself.

I noticed before that it was not explicitly listed, but I was hoping
that some of the newer drivers might be backward-compatible. 
 
>  I took a look at "hpscanpbm", which is a command-line program to scan
> from HP scanners direct to a file, and which the SANE HP driver is based
> on:
> ------------
> This program controls Hewlett-Packard ScanJet series scanners. It captures
> the image based on command-line parameters, and provides it
>     as a thresholded, dithered, grayscale, or full-color Portable Pixmap. 
> 
>     This is not a device driver; your ScanJet should be connected to a
> SCSI adapter that is supported by Linux (which does not include the card
>     that came with the ScanJet). This program uses the generic SCSI
> interface, so this feature must be available in the kernel. 
> ------------

I'll look into getting this app.  Do you know off-hand where I can get
it?  If not, I'll do a web-search when I get a chance.  :)
 
>  It doesn't look promising...
> 
> > architecture, with the I/O card in an ISA slot.
> 
>  Is this "I/O card" the one that came with the ScanJet? Does it work as a
> regular parallel port (can you plug a printer or perhaps a Zip drive into
> it?)

The I/O card is actually a multi-I/O..
EIDE+Floppy+Serial+Parallel.  All are enabled and working properly.
Yes, I have had a dot-matrix printer working on the parallel port
before.  This time, however, I modified my /etc/printcap to contain
only one remote-printer definition pointing to my other linux box.
Thus, lpd should not be trying to use this parallel port and should
not be conflicting with the scanner software or device.
 
>  If so, it's just barely possible you might be able to get this to work.
> >From what I understand, the Zip drives talk some funky SCSI-over-parallel
> language. *If* you can get that parallel-to-SCSI converter module, and
> *if* it talks the same way to the ScanJet, it *might* work...

I'm aware of the SCSI emulator kernel module... I forgot to check that
a moment ago while rebuilding my kernel, though... I can go back and
try that tomorrow.  Also, I *do* have a SCSI->Parallel adapter kicking
around which was given to me with the scanner.  I also have a SCSI
card floating around which is known to work with the NCR-5380 module.
I suppose that I could add those two components, but at first, this
seemed like overkill... perhaps now it is the way to go.
 
> > misconfigured).  I created a link /dev/scanner -> /dev/lp0 when I run
> > xcam and tell it to use either pnm:0 or pnm:1 (what are these?) it
>                                  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>  These are dummy scanners, for testing purposes. When you "scan" with
> them, it just reads a graphics file in PNM format off the disk.

This makes perfect sense now.  The last time that I saw 'pnm:' though,
was with rvplayer5.0 in 'pnm://www.ithaca.edu/radio/vic/viclive.ram'
or something like that. 
 
>  Sincerely,
> 
>  Ray Ingles          (248) 377-7735      ray.ingles@fanucrobotics.com
> 
>  "One man's 'magic' is another man's 'engineering'. 'Supernatural' is
>                  a null word." - Robert Heinlein
> 
> 

Forgive me for not chopping out all the extraneous info here... it's
in the interest of my time ;-)

 - DeJay.

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