Geek on Two Wheels

Update on the Brother MFC-420CN situation:

The Perl CUPS wrapper is done, and seems to be working fairly well, at least for just simple printing using only the default options.

On the SANE side, things are less than ideal. Despite finally being able to cleanly compile the brother and brother2 back-ends against the latest sane-1.0.18 sources, there are problems with required functions not being properly defined, and hence unusable.

For those that care, the Brother binary SANE drivers don’t work because sane-1.0.17 did not have a workaround that allows multiple processes to access the same USB device simultaneously. This is required for multi-function printers, where the usblp will reserve device at boot time, causing SANE to always receive a BUSY status when querying for the scanner.

Although both sane-find-scanner and scanimage -L now successfully detect the MFC-420CN scanner, actually attempting to execute a scan results in an “Invalid argument” error. Apparently, one or both of the USB printer (usblp) and mass-storage (usb-storage) modules conflict with sane when it comes to device access.

The good news, however, is that, upon closer inspection, the brother2 sane backend is actually fully open sourced. Not surprisingly, it has portions of SANE’s code packaged with it as well, which may or may not be compatible with my installed version of SANE. Consequently, it looks like I’ll be spending the next while re-packaging the source package so that it compiles and links on my Gentoo system in a less stupid way.

Wish me luck.