I have spent the past few days tearing my hair out trying to install a Canon Canonscan 600 on Mandrake 10.

The problem was installing an ISA SCSI adaptor - Mandrake simply wouldn't auto-detect it. Being somewhat new to Linux, I am glad to report triumph and would like to now pass on what I have learnt in case others find themselves in a similar situation.

The SCSI card in question was an ADAPTEC 1502AP. It's set to run at 0x140 on IRQ 10 (Admittedly, I worked out this step from Windows hardware manager). From a google search, I determined it uses the 'AHA152x' driver for linux.

And here is what I had to do to get it working under Mandrake 10 Official:

SETUP
Plug in your scanner into the SCSI card, turn it on then boot up the PC.

BIOS
Enter system bios, go to 'Plug and Play settings' and set 'PNP OS Installed' to 'NO'. This will force the BIOS to configure the PNP settings.

Next, you should find a list of Interrupts, all of which are most probably set to 'PCI/PNP' or something similar. Find IRQ 10 and change it's setting to ISA.

Save your BIOS settings and boot into Mandrake.

MANDRAKE
Firstly a quick test to see if we can load the drivers. Start a shell session as root and enter:

> modprobe aha152x aha152x=0x140,10

With luck there should be a brief pause while the drivers load. To test if it is successful, enter:

> ls /proc/scsi

If all is well, you should see a directory called 'aha152x'. We'll now check if the scanner is detected:

> cat /proc/scsi/scsi

This should give an output similar to:

Attached devices:
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 01 Lun: 00
Vendor: CANON Model: IX-06015C Rev: 1.07
Type: Scanner ANSI SCSI revision: 02

Finally, we'll load the SCSI drivers at startup and save us having to manually enter the 'Modprobe' command every time we restart the PC:

Open '/etc/modprobe.preload' and add 'aha152x to the list. Eg:

# /etc/modprobe.preload: kernel modules to load at boot time.
#
# This file should contain the names of kernel modules that are
# to be loaded at boot time, one per line. Comments begin with
# a `#', and everything on the line after them are ignored.
# this file is for module-init-tools (kernel 2.5 and above) ONLY
# for old kernel use /etc/modules
aha152x
amd-k7-agp

You will also want to edit '/etc/modprobe.conf' and add the line 'options aha152x aha152x=0x140,10'. Eg:

#/etc/modprobe.conf
alias eth0 8139too
options aha152x aha152x=0x140,10
install usb-interface /sbin/modprobe usb-uhci; /bin/true

Reboot the PC, login as root and enter 'cat /proc/scsi/scsi' and the scanner information should appear!

Configuring the scanner itself was an effortless task, simply follow the scanner wizard in the DrakX Control Panel (you might need to start the Saned service manually). My scanner which used to be tied to an MS box is now happily shared out across my LAN.

As mentioned earlier, I'm pretty new to Linux so am not sure if I'm describing commonly known knowledge. My apologies if I am.

I do have to give a big kudos to Matt Marjanovic's article, The Microtek, AVA-1502 and Linux. The site is currently down but a google cache is available at http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache...ava+1502&hl=en .