Hi, On Sat, Oct 05, 2002 at 06:54:17PM +0200, Till Kamppeter wrote: > Another idea: One could perhaps even put some mechanism/tool into SANE > which extracts firmware files from Windows driver CDs or from Windows > driver packages provided on the internet automatically by using > "cabextract" (http://www.kyz.uklinux.net/cabextract.php3) and "unzip" to > browse the packages and to extract the files and adding the names and > paths of the needed firmware files in the driver packages and also the > names and the URLs of the driver packages in a database included in the > sane-backends package. Then a scanner setup program could ask the user > for the Windows driver CD or download from the web and then the firmware > will be copied onto the user's hard disk so that SANE can upload it when > initializing the scanner.
The main problem is that I haven't found any way to extract the files. I tried unzip, cabextract, and i6comp but nothing was able to extract the firmware from the windows binaries. These aren't simple self-extracting zip files but a complete installation program with the twain drivers, firmware, documentation in one single file. Maybe this firmware-download on-demand is an idea for the distributions' scanner tools. It would be easier if we could place the firmware files on a webserver somewhere. Or if someone writes a GPLed frimware :-) Bye, Henning
