Your message dated: Fri, 10 Apr 1998 16:09:35 +0930
>
>Folks,
>        I have managed to borrow a umax uc630 colour scanner from work
>and I would like to have a bit of a play with it under netbsd.  I have
>configured the kernel up and the scanner is recognised as a scsi
>scanner.  Now I need some software that will drive it - I know that
>PINT is out there, is there anything better?  Has anyone done the work
>of "porting" pint to netbsd?  Thanks.

PINT has been part of NetBSD since 1.2 (I think). However, I don't think
support for the Umax scanners is in there, only scanjet/mustek support. Some
time ago I added support for some Ricoh scanners to it. I got it working
but haven't cleaned up the code nor is it tested for the scanners I don't
have. Adding support for a scanner that sticks pretty close to the SCSI
standard isn't very difficult. I did it without any prior kernel/driver-coding 
experience. 

My experience has been that PINT is hardly `out there' anymore. Couldn't
find lot of info and further development of PINT looks a bit dead to me.
If anybody can correct me on that, I'd be happy to hear it. A more active
and interesting project is the SANE project. It has some NetBSD support, 
and  can use NetBSD's PINT interface although it's awkward in some aspects.
I don't know whether the `raw-scsi' backends of SANE will work with NetBSD
(maybe with the scsi-lib???) without modification, but SANE is a valuable
source of information wrt to scanners. You can find it on the Web at:

http://www.mostang.com/sane/

I've considered extending NetBSD's PINT interface a bit, to facilitate a better
and cleaner interface to SANE. Basically, adding a sysctl to query the driver
for the functionality and limitations of the scanner and clean up some stuff. 
I've been hesitating with this, as I don't know how much of a standard PINT
is and whether its development is actually dead. The effort would be wasted
if it would result in incompatible PINT versions floating around. Please 
comment. I also would like to know from a freebsd-aware person, what direction
freebsd is taking. I understood PINT was used by freebsd, but I can imagine
they have dumped it and just provide a user-level SCSI-API and do the scanner
specific stuff in userland (like most of SANE does)...


Feico Dillema.
--- I don't have a problem with my last name