Peter Vandenabeele
Installed Agfa Snapscan e25 scanner on Ubuntu
Eventually we got to it. My kids got the old Agfa e25 scanner (year 2000 or something) from their mom ... without a power supply. So, first debugging the power supply, it says it needs 16 Volt 900 mA rectified. Turns out some of these power blocks have their output rectified and some not. I accidentally connected a non rectified version (alternating current) to it ... it didn't work (except for a nice flicker effect on the LED), but also it didn't burn out :-).
Lesson 1: measure the DC and AC voltage of a power block before connecting. For an alternating current power block, the DC voltage reads close to zero (don't try this with 220V, it may blow up your meter if you use low ranges of DC voltages).
Went back to the good old hand-built power supply in the wooden box (some of my friends will remember that from previous offices). Connected that and actually starting at 8 Volts or something the scanner started to give off some lights :-) Cranked it up to 15 Volt and the scanner works great.
Naively, we assumed it would be much easier to install this on a Windows XP box than on Linux ... no way! After trying for like 2 hours to get the the Agfa drivers that are promised to also work on Windows XP I gave up (when inspecting the files, it clearly shows only driver directories for Windows NT, 2000 and Me ... I don't understand how even the official Agfa support site promises these are Windows XP drivers ...).
As a "last attempt", I tried to install the old scanner in Ubuntu? It took me a full 5 minutes to type apt-get install sane sane-tools, find out that the Snape25.bin file needed to be copied in the /usr/share/sane/snapscan/ directory and there we go :-) (that file can be extracted with cabextract from the official Agfa download, that was intended for Windows). And on top, sane has much more features than the limited set of image processing features that where supplied in the free proprietary image processing application that was originally supplied by Agfa with the scanner.
Lesson 2: my naive assumption that commercial devices are easier to install in Windows then in "desktop Linux" can be really trashed now. Desktop linux at least allows one to go to the details and tweak what is required to get it working.
Lesson 3: scanning in full color at 600 DPI gives nice results (and large files: 100 MByte for an A4). The view on the screen is really sharper than the eye can see on the paper.
/me happy camper :-)
Anonymous wrote:
Hi Peter, my old fashioned Snapscan e50 works with XP. It was a bit tricky - if I remember rightly, it was some time ago. Try to install the software in the "Windows compatibiliy mode". Right-click to the *.exe file, properties, compatibility ... . Microsoft provides some information on http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/helpandsupport/learnmore/appcom... Hope this helps and you can use the Snapscan over a longer period. Unfortunately I have now the same problem with Vista. :-) - Clemens
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Anonymous wrote:
Thank you very much. Now i can use my scanner on ubuntu :D.
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Anonymous wrote:
Agfa Snapscan e50 WinXP Ubuntu 8.04 SANE
Hello Peter,
I came across your blogpost with very much of the same problem. My girlfriend needed to Scan a document with a borrowed scanner and I had the joyfull task of getting it to work. In WinXP unless you want learn something new about USB Port monitoring, WinDebug and registry access monitoring this is an adventures task.
From what I could find on the net it seems you have one shot at it. Make sure no USB devices apart from the scanner are plugged in and install. If you get this wrong the first time there is something in your registry which prevents any subsequent install to override the initial settings. I could not get it to work for an hour when I finally came across your post. Hello - I have been running Ubuntu 8.04 for a week now. Yes - it's very cool, my somewhat oldish laptop received a major performance boost vs previous XP and I'm very happy but drivers? Everyone knows linux has a lack of drivers! How wrong I was. All I had to do in ubuntu 8.04
In the commandline: sudo apt-get install sane
Plugin your device
Applications - Graphics - XSane Image Scanner
Job done :-)
This left my girlfriend puzzled (and me as well). Actually she is starting to get really jealouse about my linux system but for now she is locked in to her windows system because of Adobe Illustrator. I haven't found a way yet to get her comfortably running under Linux. But every day she is getting closer to giving a dual boot environment a go.
Thanks for sharing Peter and thanks to the people @ SANE and Oliver Rauch for the frontend for making this experience possible
Thomas
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Anonymous wrote:
I wrote a letter to AGFA telling them about the problem and asking them to inform people about the linux alternative.
Here is their reply:
QUOTE
Dear Thomas,
Thank you for your message. We will keep it in mind when someone contacts us with the same problems you experienced.
I should, however, inform you that our company stopped producing and selling scanners in 2001. A couple of years later, we sold our Consumer Imaging division, which means that we stepped out of the market. As a result we no longer employ people who are specialized in consumer imaging equipment. Our focus in now entirely on imaging and IT in the healthcare sector and the printing industry, as well as in a number of industrial niche markets.
After we discontinued the scanner product line, we continued offering support through external partners until our contracts with those partners expired.
Agfa thanks you for your understanding.
QUOTE END
As you can see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows#Timeline_of_releases
when they stopped producing scanners windows XP was just released, not even speaking of the later Service Packs. So I don't think you can blame them for putting it up on their webpage. In fact respect for leaving it out there for so long. It would be nice to have a link for the Linux alternative though since I think it could be a trap for many people. To my knowledge there are still many working AGFA Scanners out there and with the rise of fatty Vista, the majority of them will be ready for the bin unless you know about the Linux alternative.
Thomas
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