i’ve been happily using manjaro for ~6 years on laptop and desktop with barely any problems. this is the first time i am really stuck. i was wondering if anyone could help me by pointing me in a direction on how i can get my new document scanner to function.
lore: my father gets a lot of physical mail he has to scan and i’d like to scan it for him as often as i can because when he does it, it costs him so much time; he is very slow with computers. fun fact: he is over 70 years old and i installed manjaro on both his desktop and his laptop shortly after i switched. he has been using it for ~5 years .
company name: Avision
scanner model: AD130
i guess it is more of an uncommon but fast scanner, i bought it specifically to avoid the big companies. it looks simple, sturdy and not overengineered with functions i wouldn’t care for. it connects via USB. apparently other scanners can function with the SANE standard but this one uses TWAIN or ISIS standard.
so far i have typed “lsusb” in the terminal and the scanner appears in the the output as “Avision, Inc. AD130” so i assumed (probably incorrectly) that i don’t need a driver for it to be recognized.
then i installed every scanner program i could find.
Scanlite: “Sorry no device found”
VueScan: “It looks like VueScan couldn’t find your scanner”
gscan2pdf: “No devices found”
Document Scanner: “No Scanners Detected”
next thing i am trying is to run it in a virtual machine running windows just to confirm that the scanner is not broken. i’d greatly appreciate any helpful suggestions as this is frustrating me because i thought i did enough research beforehand to avoid this. maybe i am just overlooking something easy. thanks for taking the time to read this and thanks for everything else you good people are doing.
There are linux “drivers” for different distributions available from their web site.
As usual, Arch is not directly supported, but there are .deb and .rpm versions, which can be used.
No one seems to have had a need for this yet, I couldn’t find a PKGBUILD on the AUR for it.
Works in conjunction with sane - libsane is listed as a dependency in the .deb package I looked at.
Perhaps you can even make it work by just unpacking the .deb and copying the contents to the appropriate places - after all, this is what a PKGBUILD would do.
update: the scanner does work. i tried with Windows 10 (with drivers + software that were included on a DVD disc ) and it is as fast as i had hoped, it scanned 20 A4 pages duplex in less then 30 seconds @200dpi (both sides of the page in one pass!), the old scanner would have taken ~4 minutes with a 20% chance of paperjam. so virtual machine is an option, albeit disgraceful.
There are drivers for linux, just not specifically for Arch/Manjaro.
Since apparently no one else using Arch/Manjaro has the same scanner and thus had the need to write a PKGBUILD to create an installable package for these,
the only way is to create it yourself.
The starting point is:
unpack either the .deb or the .rpm and look at what is in there and where these distros are putting it.
do the same - and see whether it works
That could be the end of it for you when it works - or you could create a PKGBUILD
creating an installable package.
Which someone else then could use to not have to go through the same “pains” as you had to …
thanks for the reply. i did not even check the official website because i trusted the brave search too uncritically. brave search said in Linux i don’t need drivers for scanners because everything is inside the scan software. i guess that’s not the case.
i will try the unpacking idea , maybe there are not too many files and folders to find. please enjoy this virtual fruit cornucopia as a token of my gratitude
i forgot to mention in the op that i could not find anything in the official package repositories (neither for the scanner model nor the scanner manufacturer as a whole). i was lucky with my last scanner/printer to find packages that did everything so i tried again with this one. the only thing i did find via search-engine was something called the sane-avisionlibrary but since it does not have my scanner model in it, i gave up on it.
(that is the german site - that is where I was directed to because my browser tells them that I’m german - there definitely is the english equivalent as well)
The other drivers will contain basically the same as the one for Debian/Ubuntu.
When you unpack it, you’ll find a folder structure resembling your / (root) file system.
Just try copying the contents of each in the package to the corresponding directory in your / (root).
/etc to /etc … /opt to /opt … /usr to /usr …
It could get a little more complicated than that - because of the subtle differences in the different distros.
All this might sound like gibberish to you if you have never done this.
Unfortunately I can’t help that.
Your choice of a file manager you do this with can greatly help - or hinder - to see and do what I describe.
I use mc (midnight commander) …
I could do what I described in literally less that 20 seconds using mc
It would take me two times ten to the third of 20 seconds at least
to describe how to do it in a graphical file manager or on the command line.
That is why I’m not more specific right now.
It is a bit frustrating to know what to do, but explaining it to someone else who doesn’t have the experience is (or seems to be) so difficult.
update: i’ve downloaded the debian x64 package (that’s the same one you linked to in your third post) just to stare at it creepily a bit and i was surprised how much sense i was able to make. i unzipped everything and just opened the instruction files with the kate texteditor and a few things i didn’t know so i asked the same brave AI that previously betrayed me and so far i have gathered this:
the package depends on the debian package “libsane”. in manjaro i don’t have that same package, the one i have installed is just called “sane” but it seems like they save into the same directory(etc/sane.d) so maybe i already have everything i need despite different package names and i can just copy the files over manually.
i do want to get more into terminal apps because i feel like i am wasting a lot of time but what has made it difficult for me so far is that i have yet to create a place for my own documentation. when i start a nice terminal application, i keep forgetting where i saved the commands and then i only use them rarely and after a few days of busy being a human on earth i completely forgot about them.
i juggle a lot of files graphically with keyboard shotcuts and filemanager bookmarks (in dolphin, with large font and big symbols), i wonder if the application you speak of really would be faster for day to day operation of creating folders, moving and renaming files because i can use dolphin quite quickly.
i did just use the terminal though to start thunar in sudo so i can copy and paste the folders because in not-sudo it was blocked because dolphin knew i was up to trouble. first i reboot and then i try if the scanner works now.
bad news: the 4 scanning applications still did not find the device. just copying did not do the trick, the hunt continues though i already learned something.
oh this looks awesome, if i understand it correctly this is like these little sample buttons that the DJs use where they have their short sound files prepared and just click on the right square and the sound effect plays from the speaker, like an airhorn or an or a dog barking. what the radio jockeys used but not for sound-files but for terminal commands instead. press the number, hit enter and the command executes. this would be WAAAAY better then just having a text file to comb through every time.
Is /opt in your $PATH ? Because that is where the scanner drivers libraries will end up when you do what I suggested.
That was my initial question anyway -
but then I looked at another file in the package: Debian/postinst
look at what is in that file Debian/postinst
symlinks are created from /opt to /usr/lib/sane
… the little things one needs to see and find and copy / take into account
As it is - your stuff is in /opt and your system doesn’t even know it’s there.
… on a Debian/Mint/Ubuntu or Fedora or Suse system - it would just work
On Arch, there is some converting/translating work to do, since no one else has done it yet for this driver.
lore update: i installed manjaro gnome for my 70+ year old father on his laptop a few weeks ago, thinking he might like the simple style reminiscent of tablets and smartphones but he didn’t. he wants kde back
yes sane is indeed installed and the opt folder already existed in my “/” because the coapp for the ‘video download helper’ browser-plugin installed itself there.
(facepalm) i just accidentally executed postinst
there is a lot of stuff i can’t yet make sense of in the postinst file. there is something being done to quite a few folders that i have not touched when i copied
as of now it looks like a case for my disgraceful virtual machine solution but beyond that, since i like this scanner a lot and i have yet to contribute to open source software maybe this might be a good opportunity to explore the possibilities of paying someone to convert this. also i wanted to contact the manufacturer, maybe they go halfsies with me, maybe it can be done in a way that they will publish the driver to their website. probably out of my price range for now though but i do believe it would be useful to know the possibilities of finding and hiring open source devs. i start research this tomorrow plus tomorrow i want to create a simple version of the
i already know what i want it to try to do. it’s gonna display the list and the first entry says “1 unbiased estimation of your physical appearance” and when i type 1 and press enter it is supposed to say “yeeeEEeesss very handsome!”. it looks like something i can figure out myself by just looking at the code and trying to execute it myself
What this script does is:
it creates symlinks
from the files which you copied to /opt
to /usr/lib/sane/...
and to /usr/local/lib/sane/...
and so on …
so that these are available to your existing sane installation - adding the avision libraries to the already existing ones
If you executed this file, these symlinks should now be there and one would hope that the scanner is functional now.
This would only have worked when you executed the file as root - otherwise you would not have had permission to actually create these symlinks.
… providing that you also copied what is in the packages /etc and /usr to your actual systems /etc and /usr
All the copying from the unpacked package to your actual / (root) file system needs to be done as root.
ps:
I just had a closer look
The script postinst, which creates all the symlinks, checks for libusb-0.1
which is not by default installed in Manjaro or Arch.
So:
it wouldn’t even have done anything anyway, because that condition was not met.
Install libusb-compat - and then try again. libusb-compat provides this library
… the little differences between the distributions …
i tried executing the file (in dolphin: rightclick->properties->permissions->allow executing file as program), it showed me that libusb-0.1 wasn’t present, did something and immedeatly logged me off (which startled me a bit ) but system seemed to be fine after.
then i did install the libusb-compat and executed again and this time it didn’t log me off afterwards and it clearly recognized i had installed libusb-0.1.
i think i copied everything correctly but still the scanner was not recognized.
it was interesting to see this deep under the hood and see how the system functions with shortcuts like that. it never occurred to me that an installation process would be copying files into the right folders, create those folders if necessary and set shortcuts the same way i would do it. i noticed after visiting the folders you mentioned:
did not have the files inside modified because they have last modification dates of 2024 shouldn’t the postinst have touched them in some way? with my newfound confidence of being a biological program installation organism i want to manually visit the folders that i find in the postinst to look for clues if something was changed in these folders. i do that next time though.
i did make progress with the Manjaro CheatSheet. i created my own version of the cheat sheet (that currently merely outputs how good looking i am), saved it in a easy to find location (hopefully) and can now remember all the terminal commands i encounter and don’t want to forget. i am hoping i can turn it into a thing that i can use to quickly change all the system settings to how i like it every time i install (or reinstall, which is how i deal with all big problems) manjaro. if i am lucky, all or at least most of the settings i do graphically, can also be done via terminal command which would reduce the process of setting up a new installation from something i agonize over for hours into something that is painless and takes just a few minutes .
That was really all I could do from here.
Since I do not have the scanner I cannot test nor troubleshoot what the actual problem might be.
After copying everything to the right place and then running the postinst script (as root) -
do you have the file: /etc/sane.d/dll.conf
?
ls -al /etc/sane.d/
It should be there after running the script - what is in it?
cat /etc/sane.d/dll.conf
while you are at it - I don’t know how exactly you did the copying and how you checked the result: ls -al /opt/apps/scanner-driver-avision/
The files in that package have the creation date of April 26th 2024 - that’s when avision created the package, apparently
and the symlinks created by the postinst script will show that same date.
executing the postinst as root after libusb-0.1 was installed defenetly created some links. i looked in a few folders and there were avision* files that had modification dates of 2024 but creation time-and-date a few minutes before i wrote about it here, which would be a good sign.
the only thing odd i was able to notice after looking at a few folders is this:
the postinst has this instruction
test -L /usr/local/lib/sane/libsane-avision_adv.so.1 && rm -f /usr/local/lib/sane/libsane-avision_adv.so.1
but when i visit the folder /usr/local/lib/ it is empty. there is not even a sane folder in it to place the libsane-avision* link into; i even checked for invisible files.
i do have the file /etc/sane.d/dll.conf and it contains around 100 lines, each line with short scanner-related words: "agfafocus(…)canon(…)canon630u(…)canon_dr(…)canon_lide70(…)kodak(…)kodakaio(…)ricoh(…)sharp(…)snapscan(…)avision_adv
the copying i did graphically with thunar. i typed sudo thunar in the terminal and a root enabled thunar opened up. that’s what i used to ctrl+c and ctrl+v the files in their respective places.
the results i checked with dolphin. i looked at the file modification dates but of course i forgot that those only update when the file is changed, which did not happen while copying them over. so in the detail view mode of dolphin i enabled a column with creation date which i then sorted by and it would show me the avision links as the latest entries in the folders that i checked.
i have yet to contact the manufacturer, maybe they have some ideas or suggestions of things to try.
on laptop and desktop with barely any problems. this is the first time i am really stuck. i was wondering if anyone could help me by pointing me in a direction on how i can get my new document scanner to function.
) and it is as fast as i had hoped, it scanned 20 A4 pages duplex in less then 30 seconds 
i’m trying this now. it will literally take me 10 minutes using ctrl+c, ctrl+v and clicking on the folders to highlite 
into something that is painless and takes just a few minutes