Man page 5 : sane-genesys

sane-genesys - SANE backend for GL646 and GL841 based USB flatbed scanners

The

sane-genesys library implements a SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy) backend that provides access to USB flatbed scanners based on the Genesys GL646 and GL841 chips. At present, the following scanners are known to work with this backend:

Medion MD5345/MD6228/MD6274
Visioneer OneTouch 7100
Hewlett-Packard HP2300C
Visioneer Strobe XP100 (rev3)/XP200/XP300/Roadwarrior
Canon LiDE 35/40/50/60
Pentax DSmobile 600
Syscan/Ambir DocketPORT 485/487/665/685
Xerox Travel Scanner 100

This is stable software for supported models. But if you test new or untested scanners, keep your hand at the scanner's plug and unplug it, if the head bumps at the end of the scan area.

If you own a scanner other than the ones listed above that works with this backend, please let me know this by sending the scanner's exact model name and the USB vendor and device ids (e.g. from /proc/bus/usb/devices , sane-find-scanneror syslog) to the sane-devel mailing list. Even if the scanner's name is only slightly different from the models mentioned above, please let me know.

If you own a scanner that isn't detected by the genesys backend but has a GL646 or GL841 chipset, you can try to add it to the backend.

To give correct image quality, sheet fed scanners need to be calibrated using the calibration sheet sold with the scanner. To do calibration, you must insert this target in the feeder then start calibration either by passing the --calibrate option to scanimage or by clicking on the available 'calibrate' button in the 'advanced options' in a graphical frontend. The result of the calibration is stored in a file in the home directory of the user doing it. If you plug the scanner in another machine or use it with another account, calibration will have to be redone.

--lamp-off-time number The lamp will be turned off after the given time (in minutes). A value of 0 means that the lamp won't be turned off.

--threshold percent 0..100% (in steps of 1). Select minimum brightness to get a white point. Pixels whith brightness below that value will be scanned as black.

--disable-interpolation yes|no When using high resolutions where the horizontal resolution is smaller than vertical resolution, data is expanded by software to preserve picture geometry. This can be disbled by this option to get real scanned data.

--color-filter None|Red|Green|Blue When using gray or lineart this option selects the used color. Using a color filter will give a monochrome scan. CIS based scanners can to true gray when no filter (None value) is selected.

This backend needs libusb-0.1.6 or later installed, and hasn't tested in other configuration than a linux kernel 2.6.9 or higher. However, it should work any system with libusb where the SANE package can be compiled. For setting permissions and general USB information look at

R sane-usb (5).

The contents of the genesys.conffile is a list of usb lines containing vendor and product ids that correspond to USB scanners. The file can also contain option lines. Empty lines and lines starting with a hash mark (#) are ignored. The scanners are autodetected by

usb vendor_id product_id statements which are already included into genesys.conf . "vendor_id" and "product_id" are hexadecimal numbers that identify the scanner.

• /etc/sane.d/genesys.conf
      The backend configuration file (see also description of

SANE_CONFIG_DIR below).

• /usr/lib/sane/libsane-genesys.a
      The static library implementing this backend.
• /usr/lib/sane/libsane-genesys.so
      The shared library implementing this backend (present on systems that support dynamic loading).

SANE_CONFIG_DIR

    This environment variable specifies the list of directories that may contain the configuration file. Under UNIX, the directories are separated by a colon (`:'), under OS/2, they are separated by a semi-colon (`;'). If this variable is not set, the configuration file is searched in two default directories: first, the current working directory (".") and then in /etc/sane.d. If the value of the environment variable ends with the directory separator character, then the default directories are searched after the explicitly specified directories. For example, setting

SANE_CONFIG_DIR to "/tmp/config:" would result in directories "tmp/config", ".", and "/etc/sane.d" being searched (in this order).

SANE_DEBUG_GENESYS

    If the library was compiled with debug support enabled, this environment variable controls the debug level for this backend. Higher debug levels increase the verbosity of the output. If the debug level is set to 1 or higher, some debug options become available that are normally hidden. Handle them with care. This will print messages related to core genesys functions.

SANE_DEBUG_GENESYS_GL646

    This environment variable controls the debug level for the specific GL646 code part.

SANE_DEBUG_GENESYS_GL841

    This environment variable controls the debug level for the specific GL841 code part. Example (full and highly verbose output for gl646):
export SANE_DEBUG_GENESYS=255
export SANE_DEBUG_GENESYS_GL646=255

Jack McGill for donating several sheetfed scanners, which made possible to add support for them in the genesys backend.

R sane (7),

R sane-usb (5)

Oliver Rauch
Henning Meier-Geinitz <>
Gerhard Jaeger <>
St\['e]phane Voltz <>
Philipp Schmid <>
Pierre Willenbrock <>

Powersaving isn't implemented for gl646 based scanner.

Currently no known bug.