Comment 229 for bug 85488

Hans van Esdonk wrote:

"With my BenQ 3300U (Acer) this doesn't work. The line tube doesn't go "home" after starting xsane. If it is at home position (after using windows program mirascan) it works every now and then and I don't know why."

Your scanner likely requires proprietary firmware to be loaded when running it from Linux, as per http://snapscan.sourceforge.net/#supported

Can you check to see which USB ID your scanner is specifically? To do this, install the "sane-utils" package (from the universe repository) and run "sane-find-scanner" from Terminal.

For me, in the middle of the output was:

"found USB scanner (vendor=0x04a9 [Canon], product=0x220e [CanoScan], chip=LM9832/3) at libusb:003:007"
(the USB ID is the vendor/product strings; 0x04a9, 0x220e)

For you the output should have vendor=0x04a5 and product as 0x20b0 or 0x20de.

If its the one ending in b0, you need the firmware file u176v046.bin
If its the one ending in de, you need the firmware file u222v067.bin

That should be located somewhere in the Windows driver (you'll need to extract it; alternately it should be somewhere installed in Windows).

Put it somewhere on your Ubuntu partition and then run, partially as per http://snapscan.sourceforge.net/#work

gksudo gedit /etc/sane.d/snapscan.conf

At the very top where it says:

---
# Change to the fully qualified filename of your firmware file, if
# firmware upload is needed by the scanner
firmware /usr/share/sane/snapscan/your-firmwarefile.bin
---

change the location in that last line to the location of your firmware file.

Then restart xsane and hopefully it should work :) If not, then try the scanbuttond fix previously mentioned in this bug and see if that fixes it; please report back here either way.