SANE support ongoing?

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1

Given that SANE is going to be dropped as og core 157 - I was wondering what the best replacement would be ??

Specifically, I need to share access to a twain scanner from a number of windows work stations.

Best regards,
Dave

2

Hi @softfoot1

Why not just connect the scanner to one of the windows workstations and share it from there.

Alternatively if you don’t want to use any of the windows workstations for that you could connect it to a Raspberry Pi and add that to the network as a scanner server.

Or any other old PC could be repurposed for use with the scanner.

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3

Hi,

Given that SANE is going to be dropped [in] core 157 - I was wondering what the best replacement would be?

unfortunately, there is no replacement for SANE in IPFire 2.x. While we will certainly preserve the flexibility
of the distribution you get by installing add-ons, we try to “purify” (as one fellow developer but it a while
ago) that list: For example, it is not a good idea to run a full-featured telephony server on a firewall.

SANE is a little bit of the same: We unfortunately lack hardware and setups to test this add-on, and while
the quality of Linux drivers for printers improved to some extend over the past years, a lot of scanners still
need proprietary binary blobs to work - which we do not want to ship with IPFire.

This is the reason why we decided to drop SANE, while CUPS and related packages (which have, to the best of our
knowledge, a much greater userbase) will be kept and maintained in the future. Sounds a bit contradictory, I know… :expressionless:

Specifically, I need to share access to a twain scanner from a number of windows work stations.

For security reasons, it might be a good idea to place such centralised services in a DMZ.

However, this most likely means your Windows client will not find the scanner automatically: Autodetection often
relies on broadcast traffic here, which is not routed outside a network zone. You will have to configure the
scanner manually in this case.

Sorry for making your life more complicated. :slight_smile:

Thanks, and best regards,
Peter MĂĽller

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