USB Brother MFC 420CN Scanner - sane/scanimage/error i/o issues
 

Thank you in advance to anyone I forget to thank.

Here's the deal. I installed Debian Etch (apparently) using the business card boot cd with linux kernel 2.6.15-686. Everything works fine. I have my ATI card working, sound working (and it is Intel HD Audio, thank you alsa). I got the printer working. The problem is the scanner. Now, the printer and the scanner are one and the same unit. It is a Brother MFC 420CN. I have it attached through USB. The problem is that I continually get awkward errors when running sane/xsane/scanimage, et cetera.

I have the proper drivers installed, and I followed the instructions on the Brother website down to the very last character for installing these on Debian. They didn't generate a brother.conf (or brother2.conf) file in /etc/sane.d/. I tried to make one myself, as described at http://www.linuxprinting.org/piperma...q1/000933.html , while making modifications for my specific printer vendor and product. I didn't do this until just recently. It was the last thing I tried to do. The first thing I tried to do was open up the /dev/usbscanner as 777 and open it up to dave:users. This didn't work, so I reset it to what it was (root:scanner with 666). I tried the same for /proc/bus/usb/004/001 and 004, same thing.

If I run (xsane, for example) as user, I get (immediately after hitting accept):

If I run it as root, I get no error immediately. Instead, I go to press "acquire preview" and I get the following error:

When running scanimage -L to find my bloody scanner, as user, I get:

When running scanimage -L to find my scanner as root, I get the same thing.

When running sane-find-scanner as user, I get:

As root, I get the same. I can't help but notice that 004:004 doesn't match 004:001, but that isn't quite to the point of this yet.

Not sure that anyone cares by this point, but dmesg output:

And, it went on like that for a LONG TIME

To properly describe everything I have tried, I will tell you that I have exhaused every option I could find short of recompiling my kernel. I have spent the past two days reading every tutorial for scanners and every brother troubleshooting site. I have changed the entire operating system to 777 (disastrous results and reformat ensued). Nothing worked. I have reformatted since chmodding everything to 777.

The only other info I have is that the module "scanner" doesn't exist, according to modprobe scanner.

Can anybody help me get my scanner working?

I don't think I can help you with your problem, but I have the exact same printer running on Debian Sid and everything works. Just make sure you get the correct scanner driver and follow the directions on the Brother web site. I believe there's two different scanner drivers listed on the web site. I also got this mfc running on Ubuntu without any problems.

Thanks. You say you're running Sid? It could be a problem with SANE then. I should probably change my sources to unstable and see what happens if I upgrade. Thanks.

If I remember correctly, I had to upgrade Xsane and Sane before installing the scanner driver from Brother

My only problem with upgrading sane and xsane is that I'm afraid it will somehow destroy the known universe of my computer. (I'm not using ubuntu, but I did just fight for 3 days to get xgl working and it wasn't easy, so I don't want apt-get install sane xsane, with unstable, to accidentally remove x-window-system-core, which is what it wanted to do.)

I suppose I could try to compile it from source. I'm not afraid of doing that. It's just that most things work better in Debian if they are apt-getted.

Okay. I had a major X11 problem, so I figured it would be less time-consuming to just reboot. Then, my iPod went nuts and killed that installation. Anyway, I am now running a Sid installation. It has had several dist-upgrades and upgrades. and I am running kernel 2.6.15-1-686. Fun fun fun. The scanner still won't work. I've worked on it for a long time now and I am starting to think it would work better if I were to network the printing functions, remove the usb drivers for the printers, and let the scanner take over entirely. Then again, without the printer drivers installed, the scanner still didn't work. I have no idea what's going on.

Good news. It's fixed. The problem was simpler than one would expect. Brother updated their drivers recently. The driver didn't work with my setup. Brother sent me an older driver and it works just peachy.

Hello it seems i am having the same problem as you were, could you somehow get me a link to those older drivers?

Sure! I probably should have done that a while ago.

http://www.chumpco.com/~dave/brscan2-0.2.1-0.i386.deb

http://www.chumpco.com/~dave/brscan2-0.2.1-0.i386.deb

If you have any problems with the printer, I have a rather colourful personal walkthrough on my livejournal account.

http://heavyd.livejournal.com/37004.html

http://heavyd.livejournal.com/37004.html

Once again, good luck!

The solution
 

I had the exact same problem in Kubuntu 6.10. I have solved it after much ripping out of the hair.

If you run libusb 0.1.12 (to check run libusb-config --version) the entry in your fstab should change to:

none /dev/bus/usb usbfs auto,devmode=0666 0 0

More details are here:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/Brother_MFC_4...re_MFC_for_USB

Nice! I'll have to try it out if I ever get that machine again. I have a friend who has one. Maybe I'll get him to try it.

Network printer avoids USB issues.
 

To avoid USB problems buy a Brother network printer.
You can print and scan from your network and do not have these nasty USB issues.Just follow the simple instructions for network printing and scanning from the Brother web site.