Michaël Grünewald wrote:
Predrag Punosevac <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

Let me clarify firstly some things.

Thank you very much for this very detailed answer, it's very nice
from you!

  [SNIP]

In essence your scanner uses this file to explain the Sane the page
layout and graphics. So it is not a driver!

If I do understand, this seems a close analogue of PPL files in the
printing world, right?

[SNAP]


You meant PPD files? (Of course there is subtitle difference between CUPS-PPD files and generic PPD files used by LPD). My hunch is yes but I have not read enough documentation to say yes or no. I would really like to hear from some Sane developers or
IT professional who works on scanners who will give us more explanation.
So far my understanding is following. The kernel recognizes your scanning device using the uscanner0 driver and usb daemon as it is attached to USB. Sane-backhands and Sane-fronthands is a collection of drivers that speak scanner language. As a mater of fact it used to be that you need one driver per application per scanner (like printing in old times) but I think that one of chef achievements of Sane project is to automatize writing drivers so that you need to write one driver per application and then hack it to work on all supported scanners. Firmware is dictionary which teach sane backhand to speak proprietary language of a particular scanner. So it is something like this scanner<---> uscanner0<---->sane-backhands<----> Xsane
                                                 ^
                                                  |
firmware
I see no reason why should sane-backhands work any different on
amd64.

Now you made clear that these binary blobs consist of data (and not
of a cpu program), I do not see either. I will soon be able to tell :)

Does the generic kernel on for amd64 contains the same drivers as for i386? Also kernel driver like uscanner and even usb daemon might be on the different level of the development than in i386 as they really need to interact to different amd64 kernel.
A kernel developer could easily clarify this for us.


On another hand if you are using amd64 that tells me that you
are running serious production servers so why would you want to attach
a scanner to  such  machine is not really clear to me.

In fact, I have no serious reason to run amd64 since I use my amd64
computer as a ``user workstation'' and the main benefit from running
amd64 is to manage huge amounts of RAM --- as far as I can tell from
the various docs I have read. My reasons to run amd64 are mainly geeky
or childish :)

I hope you do not have 32 Gb of RAM as my neighbor who is a gamer and passionately in love with Windows Vista:-) On another hand those gamers are the reason that I can go to junk yard and get a
PIII with 512 Mb of RAM and 10Gb Hard-drive for $5. I am a happy camper!

As I said before the handbook is excellent but here is my quick and
dirty step by step how to for scanners.

[SNIP]

Thanks a lot for this con tribution,
I realized that Handbook article about scanner could be appended but there are people on this mailing lists who are qualified to do so
unlike me.

Cheers,
Predrag
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