Installing and AGFA 1212u Scanner in FreeBSD (and Linux)

This page contains instructions for installing an AGFA 1212u scanner in FreeBSD and Linux. I know very little about these things, so I am just writing down what worked for me.

I found an AGFA 1212u USB flatbed scanner in the trash. It works perfectly. It did not come with a power supply, so I am using the power supply from an IBM T20 laptop. To get it to work in FreeBSD 6.2, I installed the following packages from the FreeBSD ports tree.

graphics/gimp
graphics/sane-backends
graphics/sane-frontends

When building sane-frontends, there is an option to have a gimp plugin built which allows you to acquire a scan into gimp. The alternative is for the scanning software to write a file. So gimp is optional but if you want to use the gimp plugin, obviously you need gimp.

If you select the option to have the gimp plugin built, it will give you this message when you do make install:

If you built it with WITH_GIMP set to yes, you can use
xscanimage as a GIMP plug-in.  To do this, type:
ln -sf /usr/local/bin/xscanimage ~/.gimp-2.0/plug-ins/xscanimage (gimp-2.x)

Note that these instructions do not work because the default version of gimp is 2.2 now, so the correct command is

ln -sf /usr/local/bin/xscanimage ~/.gimp-2.2/plug-ins/xscanimage

And you should run that command as your regular user account, not as root. Furthermore, you should run gimp at least once before doing this so that the ~/.gimp-2.2/plug-ins directory is automatically created.

To use the AGFA 1212u you will need a firmware file. You can get this 1212u firmware file here. Big thanks to the guy who has the firmware files on his webpage. After you download that firmware file, as root, copy it to the /usr/local/etc/sane.d/ directory. Then edit the /usr/local/etc/sane.d/snapscan.conf file. Under the "General" heading, at the top of the file, add the following line:

firmware /usr/local/etc/sane.d/SnapScan1212U_2.bin

Later I will modify devfs.conf, but for now, each time I boot, as root, I run the following command:

chmod 666 /dev/uscanner0

After I did those things, everything worked correctly. Mostly I use the xscanimage program. The scanner works very well and the software has performed flawlessly. Thanks to all of the good people in the free software world who made it happen.

I put a leaf on the scanner just to play around:

Update: I used the AGFA SnapScan scanner in the Slax Linux live CD environment. Here are the steps:

Boot Slax
Get online
Download the SANE Slax module from http://www.slax.org/modules.php
Activate the module with
```
uselivemod sane_1_0_17.mo
```
Download the firmware for the scanner from the link given above.
mv /etc/sane.d/dll.conf.new /etc/sane.d/dll.conf
mv /etc/sane.d/scapscan.conf.new /etc/sane.d/snapscan.conf
Add the firmware line to snapscan.conf as described above.
Run sane-find-scanner to find out the usb device number of the scanner.
Add a line like
```
/dev/usbdev1.3 bus=usb
```
to /etc/sane.d/snapscan.conf.
If you want to use xscanimage as a gimp plugin, note that the gimp plugins directory is created the first time you run gimp. And the naming of that directory is slightly different on Slax. You have to exit gimp and open it again for it to show xscanimage in the File->Acquire menu.
Update (May 2008): To use the SnapScan 1212u in FreeBSD 7.0, I did the following:
- pkg_add -r sane-backends
- pkg_add -r sane-frontends
- copy snapscan.conf from /usr/local/etc/sane.d/dist/ to /usr/local/etc/sane.d/
- add the "firmware ..." line in /usr/local/etc/sane.d/snapscan.conf as described above.
- plug in the scanner
- chmod 666 /dev/usb0 /dev/uscanner0
- scanimage > myfile.pnm