setting up an old Brother DSmobile 620 scanner on linux

why a scanner

I wanted a scanner so I could scan hardcopies, archive them, and get rid of them. As of this writing I am still planning to go back on the road in the campervan so space is at a premium. So I found a portable scanner with theoretical linux support.

The Debian wiki article on scanning provided the basics. The Brother support page for this scanner has moved to this page.

dependency hell

Brother’s proprietary libsane-dsseries package requires libsane (>= 1.0.17) but the sane libs aren’t called that in Debian anymore.¹

a blog entry saves the day (again)

I googled the error message:

libsane-dsseries : Depends: libsane (>= 1.0.17) but it is not installable

and got exactly 1 hit: this blog entry by R4ven. It describes how to set up a fake package so that libsane-dsseries will be happy even though it’s using a renamed library. Worked great. This is what the internet is for.

You can follow R4ven on Mastodon.

1. the functionality is still there just called libsane-common. A rose by any other name… ↩