Artiscan 9600 pro 36 in gnu/linux: the wiki (backup) pages

Welcome in Tamarhack wiki section. This pages are here to make easy access to informations about using scanner Artiscan 9600 pro 36 on gnu/linux and ideas about developing the sane driver for it.

Due to wiki, the collaborative hypertext environment, set up by Mr.Malaussene(thank you!), you can now put your questions here modifying the page(s) and condivide your experience with us.

Feel free to modify the pages, ortographic errors corrections are also welcome!

You can also find the homepage of Tamarhack at http://www.autistici.org/tamarhack

Official support for the scanner

There is no official support for the scanner under gnu/linux. The scanner comes with a cdrom that contains an application for Windows named Documan. In authors intention that is the only way for use our hardware (WIN+DOCUMAN). So I asked the developers of Documan if they could give us details on the protocol used by the scanner, with the documents (of Documan!) we could easily write a driver. Unfortunately I received the following answer:

[...]

We developed this stuff a long time ago and any supporting documents are long gone.

And we are not in the habit of supplying our code to outside sources.

Sorry there is not much we can do for you.

[...]

So we have to do it without documentation. In particular I found that there are some alternative ways for writing the driver, here's the summary of my searches:

• Reverse engineering option: A way to know the protocol is to analyze wine IO logs.. (see next section)

• Rogier Wolff wrote the driver for artiscan SCSI, maybe our parport artiscan has a scsi device inside that could work with that driver. In that case we have only to write a parallel to scsi driver for that chip (and maybe it has been just written).

• disassembling the win driver..

Running Documan in wine

Legend:
#command ;you have to execute the command with root privileges
$command ;you can execute the command with normal user privileges

Wine is a open source WINdows Emulator for gnu/linux. It offers a replacement of many windows libraries and can run a large variety of windows programs. Documan works well under wine also. First you have to install wine. Visit http://www.winehq.org to download the latest version of wine or if you have debian on your system:

#apt-get install wine libwine winesetuptk

During the setup choose win98 emulation if asked. Then you have to install Documan in wine using Documan installer (use the cd shipped with the scanner), the operation is something like:

/cdrom$ wine SETUP.EXE

Now you have to configure wine to have access to parallel port; sometimes this operation is well done by default during wine setup, anyway there's a general help for this operation at: http://www.winehq.org/site/docs/wine-user/config-drive-main

The following is a configuration of wine that works for my system, using ppdev.

Wine versions tested: 20040408,20040716

Step-by-step:

1) modules activation (if they aren't kernel compiled)
#modprobe lp
#modprobe parport
#modporobe parport_pc

2) edit file: ~/.wine/config (Just change the following values, if they mismatch)
[Version]
"Windows" = "win98"
[ppdev]
"378" = "/dev/parport0"

3) You should also have read-write privileges with that device.
Use the usual commands:
ls -l /dev/parport0       #(check)
chmod 660 /dev/parport0   #(gain privileges)
addgroup user lp

4) Activate log of wine, useful to identify eventual wine errors, You have to set WINEDEBUG variable:
In bash:

$WINEDEBUG=warn+all
$export WINEDEBUG

5)Then launch it:
~/.wine/fake_windows/Documan$wine DOCUMAN.EXE &> logfile
;; redirect both stdout and stderr to logfile

6)Have fun!

Alternate method to get things running follows (direct ports access). This is higly unsecure, so it's unadvisable to run it, except if you are really desperate.

1)Change the config as this (melius abundare quam deficere):
[ports]
"read"="0x779,0x379,0x280-0x2a0,0x278-0x27f,0x378-0x37f"
"write"="0x779,0x379,0x280-0x2a0,0x278-0x27f,0x378-0x37f"

2)Run Documan with root privileges (argh)

FAQ

If you have any questions you can post here.

Q. When will be released the sane backend for the scanner?
A. There is no fixed date at this point, I'm working on understanding the protocol used by the scanner. Enrico, 2004-10-21

Q. Yesterday I was able to scan in black&white mode with wine+Documan, but not in color or grey. Any sugestion?
2004-12-15

A. Have you tried to launch wine without debug mode on? The messages printed on console can terribly slow down the scanner.