SCSI scanners

Dogone reports that Microtek E6 and HP PhotoSmart C5100A SCSI scanners do not work in Puppy "since 4.0".

The initial dialog /usr/bin/xsaneshell only asks if you have a USB or parallel-port scanner, as back then I thought that SCSI scanners were as scarce as hen's teeth. Anyway, you can press either button, they don't do much, just start /usr/bin/xsane.

So, the real problem is, why doesn't Xsane find dogone's scanners? -- it reports "no devices found". 4.1 does not include SCSI modules, so you have to use one of the SCSI kernels. If you are running Puppy with a SCSI kernel, then I have no idea what the problem is.

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Comments

"as scarce as hen's teeth"
Username: ANOSage
..probably as common as muck? At one time, nearly all scanners were scsi and came with a little ISA or PCI card to run them, along with a driver disc. What troubles me most is that 'doze can do scsi and that Linux was based on scsi. Now, all drives are, once more scsi-designated. IDE is the interloper, not vice versa. What went wrong?

Scanner
Username: Zigbert
"As earlier reported, my epson perfection 2400 photo are not detected in Puppy 4.00 or recent alphas. It works perfectly in Puppy 3.01. Output from terminal (alpha 6): #xsaneshell segmentation fault #

"as common as muck"
Username: prehistoric1
"I've had SCSI scanners all along, but haven't mentioned them because of the trouble you get from running systems with two fast controllers both expecting to get first crack at low-latency interrupts. Even on Windoze, configuring such a system so it works reliably can be an ordeal. If you have a combination of IDE and SCSI disks, only an expert knows how it will assign drive letters and boot. Too many companies designed equipment for a mass market which was moving away from expensive interfaces and concentrated on IDE and USB, ignoring SCSI. After a while, common wisdom held that adding a SCSI device to a previously working system was bad luck. (You could say the same about adding IDE controllers to SCSI systems. Somehow, this got overlooked.) I know I regularly pull the SCSI controller to get a stable system before I do any fancy configuration. If you don't know how to do the configuration, this is where the process stops. There are excellent scanners with Firewire interfaces, but in general these did not catch on. Professionals stuck with SCSI until it could be replaced with USB 2.0. Some never have switched. One I know has the Microtek mentioned above. I have his castoff Nikon Coolscan, which is slow, but high quality, and HP Scanjet 3C, which works well for scanning large documents for OCR. The HP came with two interface cards. You can be thankful I have not expected Puppy to handle the one designed for IBM's Microchannel architecture. My Epson Perfection 1650 Photo worked with 3.01, but has not been tested with 4.x. I'm using a digital camera now. Like most others, I have a backlog of pictures on film I haven't converted.

scsi support
Username: dogone
"ANOsage's point is well put. Linux was once the NEXIS of SCSI support. With the kernel's move to "sdx" device designations, lack of SCSI device support in a Linux distro is just too ironic. OK, so there's no as much SCSI equipment around these days. What is around is some of the best of breed. My Microtek E6 is an excellent scanner and my HP 35mm film scanner is darned near irreplaceable. I sure as heck don't want to have to move these devices to my wife's XP machine! Is there some reason SCSI device support can't continue in Puppy? Is it a space issue? Are there compatibility problems? Is there simply too little "demand" for it? If I represent the last of a dying breed, then so be it. Time marches on. I guess my question remains, what does dropping SCSI support buy Puppy? Offering an alternate Puppy iso with SCSI support is a perfectly acceptable option.

scsi scanners
Username: ANOSage
"What pre says is entirely reasonable, except for scsi scanners. The confusion, especially with mixed buses, mainly arose with booting. The little scsi cards used to run scanners, and a few early printers, had no intercept BIOS and no function until the system was up and running. Often, even the ID was fixed, too. Only a suitable driver was required. They should run on earlier Puppy versions because scsi HDs were always visible and later could be written to; I never got around to trying that. Where there was a problem in 'doze, it only occurred because of IRQ conflicts, which had a different cause and solution. In short, there never was a problem with scsi scanners - that had to await the appearance of USB!

SCSI interface cards
Username: prehistoric1
"Unless your scanner has a badly broken interface design which requires the cheap card they shipped with it, you can use one of the high quality PCI designs now turning up as pulls. I've used an Adaptec 2940 for years. Mine came out of a system which I upgraded. The person for whom it was done didn't want anything more to do with SCSI. I can't vouch for them, but I know one company which offers working pulls of this card at low prices. http://www.weirdstuff.com/cgi-bin/item/14208

SCSI drivers back in
Username: BarryK
"Ok, I am suitably chastised! 4.1beta will have all the SCSI modules. The alphas did not have them, to save space, instead it was required to choose one of the SCSI kernels with drivers built-in. Having the drivers built-in is good for booting from SCSI, but you have convinced me that there are enough of you out there using SCSI scanners to keep SCSI support in the standard build of Puppy. Also, having the standard kernel, with SCSI modules, means that SCSI drives will be usable, you just can't boot from them.

SCSI back in
Username: dogone
""Chastised"? Oh dear. No such treatment intended. Continued SCSI support is probably wise, though I'm left wondering why Puppy 4.0 did not recognize my hardware. But I will hold my water until 4.1 beta struts it's stuff. A side note. I've been beating the tar out of Alpha 6 with multiple and continuous huge file transfers with a half dozen applications open. 406 has neither flinched nor faultered. Contrast this with experiments earlier this week running PCBSD 1.5.1 32-bit. I managed to solicit two complete and spontaineous hardware reboots by simply tweaking KDE settings. No good.

Points
Username: ANOSage
"Pre: is your nationhood showing?! Prices don't get any lower than finding the correct commercial skip (dumpster) into which old servers are disposed. Don't think 'prices', think how to sweet-talk the refuse police - in the laudable interests of planet-saving, of course. Barry: Chastisement is not even in the frame. Just telling it like it is out here in RoW! Good, better, best is the watchword. Thank you for your reasoned change of heart; time to dust off my all-singing-dancing Microtek Professional with frames and negatives scanning capability. Nothing else comes close to this quality. I'm ordering a crane today! dogone: PC-BSD has a very long way to go. Try the auto-upgrades if you really want to break stuff. However, if, when you log into your bank, you want to be as near certain that no-one else is listening, a completely different OS used by a tiny minority might be a good choice?

Tags: puppy