I’ve got a Canon scanner that hasn’t had drivers released since Vista. I might be able to get it to work by switching to 32-bit Windows, but I figured I’d see if I could use a raspberry pi first. CanoScan 1670u
Assuming there’s drivers for it, yeah. A quick look on Canon’s driver/support section doesn’t show any results for that model.
I’ve got a Brother MFC that has Linux drivers, and I built a scan server for it. Basically just a Docker container that has the drivers configured along with SANEd. My other PCs just connect their SANE daemons to the server’s and can scan without having to have the driver installed.
So the idea will definitely work as long as you can get drivers working.
it has drivers if you scroll all the way back to Vista.
I didn’t even see the model page for that one lol.
Unless there’s a driver wrapper, you’d still need Linux drivers AFAIK.
I can’t get Windows Vista running on a raspberry pi?
Not directly, no. They’re completely different architectures. You may be able to emulate x86 on a Pi with QEMU and run Vista as a VM, but it’s going to be very, very slow (probably unusably so).
Your best chance would be a ultra small form factor PC and try to get Vista running on that (if using Vista is the only way to interface with it.
Have you tried hooking the scanner up to the Pi (running Raspbian), installing SANE, and checking if it has built-in drivers that work?
I have not. The advice I’ve gotten is that I can just install any 32-bit Windows and it should work, but that seems like a pain in the ass
Yeah, just try seeing if SANE supports it out of the box. Someone else commented with a link showing it may have a compatible driver already.
http://www.sane-project.org/sane-mfgs.html supports a lot of Canon devices. It doesn’t list that device specifically but I’ve often found that similar age/model # scanners will still be picked up by the same linux driver, eg the Canoscan 1200 it says it supports. Doesn’t hurt to try.
