According to Berndt Josef Wulf:
>
>>   It probably would suffice if ss* supported the generic SCSI commands
>> that uk* does ...
>
>Thanks, this is actually what I've tried to convey....
>

Actually, I had a look at this when I was bored once in my hotel room
(too many long blacks to sleep ;-) and was part of the way through
rewriting ss.c (well, in honesty it was a cut & paste of uk.c ;-)
when I noticed that all you really need to do is remove/disable the
minor number check in the ioctl function.  If we ifdef these lines
out (at the bottom of the function ssioctl in ss.c):

                if (SSMODE(dev) != MODE_CONTROL)
                        return (ENOTTY);

then SANE should work with the ss device.  You can actually test this
by making a scsi scanner device node with a minor number of 3 like
this:

mknod /dev/scanner c 19 3

and see if SANE works properly with /dev/scanner.  If it does we have
a few choices:

1)  Remove the code from the ss.c ioctl - I cannot see that it will
    break anything to be quite honest.

2) Make a standard scanner device node with a name that SANE looks for
   by default that has a minor number of 3.

3) Put the information in the FAQ - this would be good to do anyway
   but I don't think it is the best solution.

I would think option 1 would be most preferable.  Unfortunately, I
have lost access to the scanner I was playing with so I cannot test
these suggestions.

-- 
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Brett Lymn, Computer Systems Administrator, British Aerospace Australia
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