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Brother DS-620 on Linux

Posted on mandag, februar 3, 2014 in Planet Ubuntu-DK, Planets, Ubuntu

UPDATE: The drivers were temporarily unavailable; they seem to be up again, at least on the Brother US site: http://support.brother.com/g/b/downloadlist.aspx?c=us&lang=en&prod=ds620_all&os=128


I recently bought a Brother DS-620 document scanner that supposedly had support for Linux. It turns out it did, but only after a few quirks. I installed the official Linux drivers, and tried to scan a document using a GUI scanning application. Things were hanging and generally very unresponsive. I checked with the SANE command line tools, e.g. “sane-find-scanner”. It turns out things were indeed working, albeit very slowly. In dmesg I found a lot of messages like:
Jan 29 22:52:13 mchro-laptop kernel: [39172.165644] usb 2-1.3: reset high-speed USB device number 32 using ehci-pci
Jan 29 22:52:13 mchro-laptop kernel: [39172.333832] usb 2-1.3: reset high-speed USB device number 32 using ehci-pci
Jan 29 22:52:13 mchro-laptop kernel: [39172.501677] usb 2-1.3: reset high-speed USB device number 32 using ehci-pci
Jan 29 22:52:13 mchro-laptop kernel: [39172.669712] usb 2-1.3: reset high-speed USB device number 32 using ehci-pci
Jan 29 22:52:13 mchro-laptop kernel: [39172.837679] usb 2-1.3: reset high-speed USB device number 32 using ehci-pci

repeating several times every seconds. At this stage I was thinking that the Linux support was very crappy. After quite a lot of mucking around playing with capturing USB packets using Wireshark, it seemed the device itself was requesting a reset, and the Linux kernel was resetting it approximately 200ms later. Reading some Linux source code, and playing with USB quirks in Linux solved nothing.

Finally, I gave up and booted into Windows to check if the hardware had a defect. In Windows it worked without issues. I upgraded the firmware using the Windows utility to do so. After doing this the scanner worked without issue also in Linux.

So, all in all: There is official Linux support for this scanner, but it seems to require a firmware upgrade. This could definitely be better handled by the Brother documentation.

Bring on the comments

  1. Terrence siger:

    Hi. Which driver did you use? Of the various brscan Linux drivers I see on their site, none of them list the DS620 as supported.

  2. Terrence siger:

    Thanks for the files. Unfortunately they did not work for me. I tried emailing Brother tech support. I got a reply saying that they recently redid their website and the DS-620 driver must have been left off accidentally. They said they would submit a request to engineering and that I should check the website in a few days. That’s a better response that I was expecting! I’ll post an update soon if I find the drivers. I hope this works out; I do like the scanner and it seems well built.

  3. Terrence siger:

    The drivers are up and they work. Yay! I can’t comment on the firmware problem you had; I upgraded the firmware before getting the Linux driver.

  4. Terrence siger:

    On a related note, I just looked on Amazon.com and the scanner is $15 cheaper now than when I ordered it a week ago.

  5. Dreiser siger:

    I checked this article before buying the scanner, but as it turns out it “worked out of the box”. I just had to ‘apt-get’ the ‘libsane-dsseries’ from Debian main repo (https://packages.debian.org/stretch/libsane) and it worked. I have only tested it with xsane and GIMP, and so far it works perfect! 🙂

  6. Chad siger:

    8/18/2017
    I had to update the firmware through Windows.

    I installed the drivers, but it would scan and then stop with an error message about I/O error.

    Finally determined by accident the problem was related to the USB port I had it plugged into. Didn’t support USB 3.0. When I moved it to a USB 2.0 port, it worked fine.

  7. Tim siger:

    I installed the drivers from Brother but couldn’t find a firmware update on the brother website. After trying everything I could think of and then discovering it didn’t work on Windows either, I changed the cable and it sprang into life. Odd because that cable works with other devices.

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