Brother DS-640 Scanner

PureBread

Hello normal people,

i am having a headache in bringing this damn scanner to work in solus, with a little tinkering and working through the arch wiki i kinda got it to work, its the right Scanner, permission problems fixed, but for unknown reasons my scans only work for part of the scan after that its just white space

So when i scan with simple-scan it only scans a third of the paper, with skanlite it works to 2/3 of the paper, paperwork for example wont work with the scanner. Tried different "modes" of the scanner, which i didnt know it had (like duplex scan Oo?), no luck there, on the brother support page it says that it works with brscan4 and brscan5 so i dont think its a problem with the package.

I am at a loss here, i am not the person to write on forums for help, but my wife needs it for her work and i dont want to switch to another distro just because this stupid Scanner wont work, also my wife is satisfied with solus more than with manjaro and popos and therefore i am satisfied so why should i change that 😃, as the saying goes happy wife happy life.

If nothing helps i maybe will cave in and buy an all in one printer/scanner setup from hp, i know that those things work out of the box with most distros, but why buy new things when you have perfectly fine working hardware at home.

Keep Cool

brent

lotsa brother scanner threads: many of them Solved. Just type brother scanner in the search above.
See which brother thread mirrors your circumstances.
Although I have to say you have weird circumstances. Most are inoperable but you have a scanner that kinda works. Never seen that!
also install sane-backends and try gscan2pdf instead of simple scan.
what did the brother website say? they have a deb or targz scanner package for you?
you seem "2/3" of the way there! try some more stuff. brothers usually work on solus but ALL scanners are headaches..
edit: at devtracker above find the notorious T83 brother link. If all else fails give the solus team your brother deb link and see if they can make you a custom package.
ALSO: find the user manual at brother. Usually they call a single model, on the manual cover, 5 different (DS-850 etc) versions. so scanner drivers could be hiding in plain sight

PureBread

Hello brent, thanks for the response, let me see what i forgot to check before i stupidly ask stuff on the forums 😅 .

I already searched the forum for brother scanner and most of them are either network setup related or bringing the scanner at all to work, which does not fit my case, as my scanner is working but not how it should be 🙁.

I installed gscan2pdf and i have the same result as with simple-scan. only a third of the paper got scanned.

On the Brother website they have a rpm and deb package for driver installation, i never used them on ubuntu/popos as there it worked out of the box and also scanned the whole page (why shouldnt it right ...).

I dont want to bother the solus devs with stupid scanner drivers, maybe i work myself through it if nothing works, cant be that hard and the motivation is already there 🙂.

I dont quite understand the last part with the manual and drivers, could you elaborate what you mean?

as a workaround for my wife, i installed ubuntu in a vm so she can scan there for the time being.

edit: a little bit of extra information

# sane-find-scanner will now attempt to detect your scanner. If the
  # result is different from what you expected, first make sure your
  # scanner is powered up and properly connected to your computer.

  # No SCSI scanners found. If you expected something different, make sure that
  # you have loaded a kernel SCSI driver for your SCSI adapter.
  # Also you need support for SCSI Generic (sg) in your operating system.
  # If using Linux, try "modprobe sg".

found USB scanner (vendor=0x04f9 [Brother], product=0x0468 [DS-640]) at libusb:004:003
could not open USB device 0x1d6b/0x0003 at 004:001: Access denied (insufficient permissions)
could not open USB device 0x1d6b/0x0002 at 003:001: Access denied (insufficient permissions)
could not open USB device 0x1d6b/0x0003 at 002:001: Access denied (insufficient permissions)
could not open USB device 0x19f7/0x0003 at 001:004: Access denied (insufficient permissions)
could not open USB device 0x046d/0xc539 at 001:003: Access denied (insufficient permissions)
could not open USB device 0x046d/0xc541 at 001:002: Access denied (insufficient permissions)
could not open USB device 0x1852/0x7022 at 001:005: Access denied (insufficient permissions)
could not open USB device 0x1d6b/0x0002 at 001:001: Access denied (insufficient permissions)
  # Your USB scanner was (probably) detected. It may or may not be supported by
  # SANE. Try scanimage -L and read the backend's manpage.

  # Not checking for parallel port scanners.

  # Most Scanners connected to the parallel port or other proprietary ports
  # can't be detected by this program.

  # You may want to run this program as root to find all devices. Once you
  # found the scanner devices, be sure to adjust access permissions as
  # necessary.

scanimage -L
device `brother4:bus1;dev1' is a Brother *DS-640 USB scanner

scanimage -pv --format=jpeg --output-file=/home/purebread/test.jpg
scanimage: rounded value of br-x from 215.9 to 215.88
scanimage: rounded value of br-y from 355.6 to 355.567
scanimage: scanning image of size 1696x2799 pixels at 24 bits/pixel
scanimage: acquiring RGB frame
scanimage: min/max graylevel value = 0/255
scanimage: read 14241312 bytes in total

brent

PureBread I dont want to bother the solus devs with stupid scanner drivers,

Solus devs live for this😉...hey, they fixed me up with a custom package for my brother after I gave them a link to the deb.
Too bad about gscan2pdf.
If you look a the brother manual cover I guarantee you will see DS-640, DS-645F, DS-7010 etc etc. I think for Euro and global printers model is the same but the mumbers change? 'Hiding in plain sight' means maybe solus scanner packages may exist for those other numbers...
...but if your printing 2/3 of a page, then there is something in that deb you need. Whether its something you can copy into a solus folder or have team do it for you imho you don't have what you need installed on your system.

Too much of a laymen to intepret all that, but I have seen that permission thing lately. Some printer threads solved recently by changing permssions...so maybe its that. I don't have a command off the top of my head. Would be sudo chmod yadda yadda..
Anyone reading, can you interpret that first permissions log? Could it be that easy?
You will be successful be patient!

raspi

Hi,
I did find your post because I was looking for a solution for my Brother DS-640.
My configuration is this one:
PC Laptop EliteBook
PRETTY_NAME="Linux Mint 21.2"
Gsan2pdf = 2.12.6 from package brscan5-1.3.1-0.amd64.deb
the first time I did run gsan2pdf the scanner did not show up. I unplug/replug it, I did shut gscan2pdf and restart it, I did also change the USB port... nothing worked..
by reading your post (thanks to you) I did not fully understand everything but I noticed a software I did know called scanimage.. I did try it and this one is working well without changing anything, so I did use it.
now I am restarting now gscan2pdf and... now the scanner is showing up in the devices list..
I don't know why.

brent

raspi I don't know why.

you'll get used to that😉