[Techtalk] Updating my outdated flibranet from debian site

[Akkana Peck]

Anne Wainwright writes:
> Trying to get hp scanjet3970 to work
> find 'NEW' driver stuff on SANE site which has a standalone version 
> decide to use this because my version of sane doesn't support the 3970
> my version of sane (updated online from sarge is 1.0.13-2) and after the update .....
> my version of sane (scanimage --version is 1.0.12)
> i _am_ running as recommended as root#
> driver package script install.sh stalls because ... long story
> driver package script update.sh stalls because it doubts I have SVN client installed
> update from sarge doesn't find svn (or SVN)

Where are these package scripts coming from that require svn?
Most Linux packages have releases available as tarballs, and
don't require you to check stuff out of svn. So I'd try that
route first.

If there's some reason you really do need to check something
out of svn and that's all you need, you can probably get a tarball
of svn from http://subversion.tigris.org/ and build it from source.

But ultimately, I suspect if you're trying to build something
cutting-edge (which is what using svn usually means), you're
likely to have a lot of pain getting all the dependencies on
sarge. Sarge is really old -- years old, so old it's no longer
supported. (We recently upgraded our Sarge server to a newer
release because it's so old they're not even bothering to make
the critical DNS fix available for it.)

Also, one problem you'll very commonly see getting scanners to
work is in the setup that's supposed to notice your scanner and
make it available when you plug it in or turn it on. And Sarge's
way of recognizing hardware (I'm pretty sure it used hotplug)
is now considered obsolete and most of the distros have switched
to using udev and/or hal. What that means is that your kernel that
works just fine in Sarge might not have what it needs to work well
with a current SANE distribution. That can be worked around --
but it might mean a lot of extra work writing and debugging hotplug
scripts, and a lot of confusion where instructions that supposedly
work for other people don't work for you.

> bearing in mind all the !@#$ i had in not getting openoffice to work maybe now
> is the time to update my linux version except I want the scanner now not in
> weeks.

Do you by any chance have an extra partition on your disk, or an
extra disk, even a small one? You could try installing a modern
distro, something that's known to work with your scanner, and keep
your existing install in case anything goes wrong. Or you could try
booting a "Live CD" distro and see if your scanner is recognized
there.

	...Akkana