Out of Memory Error with Brother DCP-J7720W

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Hello, looks like the diff between groovy and focal releases is 425k lines of code changed, not something that is easily checkable for regressions, backports might be a really better area to cover this issue.

As said by the Debian maintainer in the Debian bug report, this bug is not easily fixable, if not with a new release (however I didn't try to spot the change by looking at the git log)

I would like to know if release team has a different opinion, because uploading the groovy one into focal might be a no-go

Testing it for focal-backports is probably a huge project.

$ apt rdepends libsane
libsane
Reverse Depends:
  Depends: libsane-dev (= 1.0.29-0ubuntu5.1)
  Depends: libsane1 (>= 1.0.29-0ubuntu5.1)
  Depends: sane-utils (>= 1.0.27)
  Depends: libsane-dev (= 1.0.29-0ubuntu5.2)
  Depends: libsane1 (>= 1.0.29-0ubuntu5.2)
  Suggests: libreoffice
  Depends: simple-scan (>= 1.0.24)
  Depends: sane-utils (>= 1.0.27)
  Depends: libsane-dev (= 1.0.29-0ubuntu5)
  Depends: xsane (>= 1.0.24)
  Depends: scanbd (>= 1.0.24)
  Depends: sane (>= 1.0.24)
  Depends: python3-sane-dbg (>= 1.0.24)
  Depends: python3-sane (>= 1.0.24)
  Depends: python3-pyinsane
  Depends: pike8.0-sane (>= 1.0.24)
  Recommends: libwine (>= 1.0.24)
  Depends: libsane1 (>= 1.0.29-0ubuntu5)
  Suggests: libreoffice
  Depends: libkf5sane5 (>= 1.0.24)
  Depends: libinsane1 (>= 1.0.24)
  Depends: libimage-sane-perl (>= 1.0.24)
  Depends: libghc-bindings-sane-dev (>= 1.0.24)
  Depends: gimagereader (>= 1.0.24)
  Depends: simple-scan (>= 1.0.24)
  Depends: sane-utils (>= 1.0.27)
  Depends: colord (>= 1.0.24)
  Depends: hplip (>= 1.0.24)

And people won't usually be aware of the existence of backported packages anyway. Maybe it's better to simply point at the PPA.

Just for completeness, Mick (original reporting on issue in different forum) said:-

$ scanimage -L
device `escl:http://192.168.1.94:80' is a ESCL Brother DCP-J772DW flatbed scanner

$ scanimage -T
Output format is not set, using pnm as a default.
Capability : [(null)]
Capability : [image/jpeg]
scanimage: rounded value of br-x from 0 to 0
scanimage: rounded value of br-y from 0 to 0
scanimage: sane_start: Invalid argument

and similar error with $ scanimage > image.pnm
and similar with Gscan2PDF.

Bottom line is, escl driver bugs are going to affect a lot of Epson and apple AirScan protocol scanners. Debian bugs and upstream reports all explain wider issues with escl driver.

I think it will be worth re-visiting the Backport idea after Gutsy has been out and tested for a while. PPA's have the problem they will keep being subjected to ongoing-changes and new breakages and so-on ...!.

I can see there is a fundamental difficulty that drivers are not packaged separately and so difficult to backport a particular driver (escl driver being SRU'ed would be nice...).

One possibility is to try sane-airscan, which is intended to be added to Groovy Main, see bug 1891682.

@Till: Interesting info. Do you think it would be possible to backport sane-airscan? -backports is more useful for new packages than it is for already existing ones, since the low APT priority doesn't matter if there is nothing in -release or -updates.

That fixed it. Many thanks Thierry.

On 30/09/2020 13:54, Thierry HUCHARD wrote:

    Le 2020-09-30 14:27, Mick Sulley a écrit :

        Recently did a clean install of Mint20

        I installed XSane, it scanned for devices and found my scanner,
        Brother DCP-J7720W which is wireless connected, and I scanned my
        document. It appeared to scan but the viewer screen shows nothing and
        if I try to save the file I get
        "Error during save: out of memory"

        Memory really should not be a problem, 16GB RAM showing 30% used,
        100GB free on disk.

        Other information

        Document Scanner works and I can save the file.

        Installed gscan2pdf, when I scan I get an error "gscan2pdf:
        sane_start: Invalid argument"

        mick@Mint20Desk:~$ scanimage -L
        device `escl:http://192.168.1.94:80' is a ESCL Brother DCP-J772DW
        flatbed scanner
        mick@Mint20Desk:~$ scanimage -T
        Output format is not set, using pnm as a default.
        Capability : [(null)]
        Capability : [image/jpeg]
        scanimage: rounded value of br-x from 0 to 0
        scanimage: rounded value of br-y from 0 to 0
        scanimage: sane_start: Invalid argument
        mick@Mint20Desk:~$ scanimage > image.pnm
        Output format is not set, using pnm as a default.
        Capability : [(null)]
        Capability : [image/jpeg]
        scanimage: rounded value of br-x from 0 to 0
        scanimage: rounded value of br-y from 0 to 0
        scanimage: sane_start: Invalid argument
        mick@Mint20Desk:~$

        So it looks to me like sane_start is the problem, but I don't know
        what to do about it.

        Can anyone help please?

    Hi Mick,
    Your version of sane is obselete! Update it!

    $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:sane-project/sane-git
    $ sudo apt-get update
    $ sudo apt install libsane libsane-common sane-utils

    Thierry

        Thanks

        Mick

Deleting the focal line for now, it can be fixed in that serie but to be nominated it needs an assigned owner and it doesn't have one for nom

Due to the fact that this bug only affects a few (perhaps even only one) hardware device models, and also that binary packages for all not too old Ubuntu releases are readily available upstream, we will not backport sane-backends nor introduce any extra package for focal.

Please follow the upstream README of ipp-usb

https://github.com/OpenPrinting/ipp-usb

and of sane-airscan:

https://github.com/alexpevzner/sane-airscan

The binary packages you will find here:

https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/pzz/
https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/pzz/xUbuntu_20.04/

Inclusion in the Main part of Groovy (20.10) is planeed: bug 1891157, bug 1891682

The Groovy packages are already in Universe.

From what I can tell, actually the escl buggy driver affects a wide range of
Brother, Canon, Epson, HP, Ricoh, Xerox, apple-protocol scanners ......, although
Mick reported his specific scanner, indications from sane devs and from debian bugs and other anecdotes suggest 'escl' 1.0.29 problems rather more widespread.

I really do think this is a special (and important) case for an LTS-distro, as MANY scanner manufacturers have taken up the airscan protocol and this provides a much easier scanning integration than lots of the individual protocols that came before.

I do think this is doing a serious dis-service to Ubuntu LTS users, not to even modify the packages to produce a Warning message pointing at the correct fix, when escl module gets used, even if no extra package formally in focal.

I do think it would be fair to get input from sane-devs etc... they too may be able to clarify how wide-spread issues are.

I appreciate this may need to be looked at after Groovy released and after escl/airscan modules a
bit further matured, etc, but I do strongly suspect not attending to this in some manner is going to perpetuate an increasing usability-headache, lots of duplicate bug reports, and so-on, throughout the life of focal LTS.

I can further confirm that this escl buggy driver affects other scanners, e.g. Epson XP-830 just to name *one* but there are endless Escl network printers/scanners these days.

Using the PPA:-
https://launchpad.net/~sane-project/+archive/ubuntu/sane-release
version 1.0.32 *does* work a lot better!.

I have really come to the conclusion that the sane-release PPA is very backwards-compatible with all the existing software-tools, simple-scan, xsane, skanlite, libreoffice, xscanimage, gimp, gscan2pdf, ... in all cases I have tested, the 1.0.32 sane-release ppa version of sane backends works the same or better as the focal 1.0.29 version without requiring any software to be re-compiled. 'gscan2pdf' is notably more functional than simple-scan in terms of being able to auto-rotate back-sides of scanned auto-feed pages.

The trouble comes, helping users without having to do all sorts of searching and having to 'find out' bugs hard way.... Can a new point-release of focal provide sane-backends and sane-airscan backported, well-tested packages?

As to when to get users ipp-usb (or not) installed, is another matter entirely, that also matters. For some ipp-usb makes the scanning work well, for other cases not, needs to be NOT running to support legacy scanner drivers!... I suspect for 22.04 ipp-usb should be provided by default.