Summary

This parallel port scanner has a proprietary protocol Agfa refuses to open. Too bad. The Windows driver software runs in VMware, however, and maybe it works in the future in wine or bochs, both of which lack real parallel port support when I last tested them.

this scanner works fine on vmware 5 with win98 installed if vmware is installed on windows xp
but in opensuse 10.1 it don't work at all on vmware 5 on a dell lattitude laptop because for some reason suse's new hardware configuration (last linux I used was mandrake 7) (am a bit out of date, but love a challange,) contains some very dodgy attitudes towards parport0 and its overalluse by software, for example parport0 picks up if connected before booting the laptops scsi floppy on the parport but very little else, various bios flips have not worked so the problem with parport use is not the fact that the hardware doesn't work, it just appears to be vmware is incapable of understanding suse's architecture, although I am going to recompile vmmon and vmnet, and bash around in its source to see if this solves the problem, if it does will let someone know, also wondering if as a win98 driver exists whether somekind of inf to module conversion wouldn't allow the scanner to run under sane on xp the problem with the driver is not the scanner but the agfa miniscsiport driver which allows the hardware to run on the parallel port, if xp can't see the scsiport it can't see the scanner