Fujitsu Scansnap Issues

[bweinel]

All,

I have just recently been working to install a Fujitsu ScanSnap M300 on my Xenial box. I had to do a few preliminary things to get the system setup to talk to the hardware correctly.

First off I ran "sane-find-scanner -v" to see if it could be located. It returned:

found USB scanner (vendor=0x04c5 [FUJITSU], product=0x1156 [ScanSnap S300]) at libusb:001:003

Next I had to find the support drivers for the scanner. Using hints from the epjitsu.conf file in /etc/sane.d/ I downloaded the windows driver, extracted the 300_0C00.nal file from the CAB file, I then placed it in the /usr/share/sane/epjitsu/ subdirectory so it could be referenced by sane.

Next I checked the /etc/sane.d/epjitsu.conf file to make sure it was correctly pointing to the 300_0C00.nal driver (it was...) and referencing the correct vendor and product ids (it was...)

At this point I started xsane. It was able to recognise the scanner. I tried a preview scan. It scanned the sheet but only ingested about 30% of the scanned data into xsane. The xsane preview 'hung' until I hit the 'cancel preview' button.

I dropped back into a terminal window and executed a scanimage acquisition scan command directly from the command line:

scanimage -d epjitsu:libusb:001:003 >/home/bweinel/test.pbm

scanimage returned the entire page as the test.pbm file with no errors. Consequently, I am confident that the scanner and the associated USB hardware is working just fine. However, there seems to be an issue with sane and skanlite in accessing the hardware.

As an aside... I though of permissions... so I went into /etc/udev/rules.d and setup a 99-local.rules file containing the following:

# Fujitsu ScanSnap S300
ATTRS{idVendor}=="04c5", ATTRS{idProduct}=="1156", MODE="0664", GROUP="scanner", ENV{libsane_matched}="yes"

I rebooted and checked the scanner device permissions:

bweinel@speedy:~$ ls -l /dev/bus/usb/001/003
crw-rw-r--+ 1 root scanner 189, 2 May  6 16:06 /dev/bus/usb/001/003

I also made sure I was in the scanner group and had permissions:

bweinel@speedy:~$ sudo usermod -a -G scanner bweinel
bweinel@speedy:~$ id
uid=1000(bweinel) gid=1000(bweinel) groups=1000(bweinel),4(adm),20(dialout),24(cdrom),27(sudo),46(plugdev),108(lpadmin),109(scanner),124(sambashare)

So everything looked right to this point, but neither xsane nor skanlite would preview correctly... I'm beginning to suspect a possible bug.
Thoughts anyone?

cheers,
bill

[bweinel]

A quick update for all,

This morning I tested the same software scenario with the Fujitsu Scansnap scanner on a Bionic machine and... it all works (including xsane.)

The version numbers for xsane are the same between the two machines.. so I can only conclude that there must be a difference in the kernel or the libs between the two that are causing the issues. I haven't yet had time to dig into it to narrow it down further.

cheers,
bill

[bweinel]

Another update for those interested,

Problem solved! After finding that xsane worked fine with the same scanner set up on a Bionic machine, I added the sane ppa (https://launchpad.net/~rolfbensch/+a...buntu/sane-git) to load the current version of sane from the daily git snapshot onto my xenial system. Now everything works as it should.

I can only surmise that the issue was caused by a regression in xsane which was repaired in the later version.

cheers,
bill