Hello, I recently purchased a Samsung CLX-3170fn and I would like to report some of my findings with it and possibly to get some advice on how I may make it work better with sane.
First of all as stated in its specification it is supposedly supported under linux and sure enough there are linux drivers supplied on the driver CD and on the Samsung website, so I decided to install the Samsung drivers. Unfortunately it didn't work fully as I would hope, when I scan with scanimage the scanner performs the scan but scanimage comes up with a warning: "scanimage: WARNING: read more data than announced by backend" and the message is followed by two numbers (assumeably the announce data amount and actual read data amount). When I try and use the image data in another application it tends to fail to use the image (eg. performing OCR using ocrad gives a message "ocrad: end-of-file reading from pnm file."). Reading around on the internet has lead to no answer to solve this and when I contacted Samsung support I basically got a reply saying they don't provide support for their Linux drivers. One thing I can confirm is that my installation of sane is working fine as I can use a HP scanner on the same computer. Whilst searching for a solution to the Samsung driver issue I noticed that some comments said that Samsung and some Xerox devices work in a similar way so I decided to see if I could get the Xerox driver supplied with sane to work with my Samsung CLX-3170fn, so I added the USB information to the /etc/sane.d/xerox_mfp.conf file. As far as I can tell this seems to work (I am visually impaired so can't visually check the scanned image but I am able to use the images for OCR) with one slight bug. It appears that using the xerox_mfp driver scanadf doesn't detect the paper state in the document feeder, so from what I have experienced either the device crashes (emitting a long beep from the speaker) and restarts or scanadf keeps adding images for extra pages (although the ADF doesn't try to take more paper). Also I thing the Samsung driver may have had some extra options (eg. --page-format so that you could set the page by the paper size name). So what could be done to support this device properly under Linux? My system configuration (at least what I think is relevant): Debian unstable (updated to the latest packages at the weekend) Sane from debian packages (eg. libsane=1.0.10-4) Device connected through USB Samsung drivers 3.00.37 (although the ones on the driver CD also came up with the same warning). Any help would be appreciated Michael Whapples
