We are trying to connect a scanner ( Brother printer-scanner MFC490CW) which already works fine as the printer. We downloaded the
'brscan3" driver and the scan-key-tool (whatever that is) and 'installed them' (rpm's), then made a link (-s) for xsane in the appropriate directory. When attempting to invoke the scanner from Gimp, using File-Create-Xsane: Device Dialog and we get the following error:

Plug-in crashed: "xsane" (/usr/lib/gimp/2.0/plug-ins/xsane) [note, why is this Dir 2.0 when I have 2.6 Gimp?]
The dying plugin may have messed up GIMP's internal state. You may want to save your images and restart GIMP to be on the safe side.

When I run sane-find-scanner, it finds it and displays:
found USB scanner (vendor=blabla product=blabla) at libusb:001:006

When I run 'scanimage' from the command line, I get:
bugchk_free(ptr=(nil))@brother_modelinf.c(467)
Aborted (core dumped)

Also... when I

Any ideas what's going on? and where to go from here? Scanner needed badly!
TIA

Ruth