Wed, 03 Dec 2008
Keywords: linux ubuntu 8.10 intrepid ibex sane hp scanjet 5370C avision
Another of the things that broke when I upgraded Ubuntu to 8.10 was the scanning. To be fair, it had barely been working since the upgrade to 8.04, but with 8.10 scanimage just crashed. I debugged it a little and discovered that by uncommenting "option disable-calibration" in /etc/sane.d/avision.conf I could avoid the crash, but after scanning in one direction the scanner wouldn't return to its resting position.
Eventually, I decided that if I was going to fix the crash I'd have to build a debugging version of the code, and that if I was going to do that I should get the latest version available. It turns out that was in a CVS repository and was fairly easy to obtain and build:
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.alioth.debian.org:/cvsroot/sane co sane-backends ./configure --sysconfdir=/etc --prefix=/usr/local/pkg/sane make make install
And BINGO! The crash was fixed, and I didn't had to change any code at all.
I still had the problem, which was also there in 8.04, that the preview in xsane has diagonal stripes. Do I decided to do away with xsane and replace it by a small shell script which I imaginatively named scan:
#!/bin/sh out=$1 shift LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/pkg/sane/lib/sane:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH /usr/local/pkg/sane/bin/scanimage -d avision -v -p --resolution=300 "$@" > /tmp/out.pnm convert -quality 90 -verbose /tmp/out.pnm $out gimp $out
So now, when I scan album art, for example, (which is what I most commonly scan nowadays), I can just type scan front.jpg and the cover is scanned and thrown up in gimp for me to crop and save. This has been working well so far.
