Hints for Using the AVA-1502

Microtek scanners tend to ship with a cheap Adaptec AVA-1502(E/AE) ISA-SCSI adapter card. This card *does* work under Linux, but requires a little bit of coaxing.

Here are some hints to help you get started. (If anyone has suggestions for other OS's, or clarifications or embellishments for Linux, I'd be happy to print them here.)

Setting up the hardware

• The card has jumpers to select an IRQ line (typically 9, 10, 11, or 12) and a Base I/O address (typically 140h or 340h). Choose these so that they do not conflict with any other hardware in your system, and make a note of them.
• If you have a PCI PNP BIOS in your system, i.e. one that tries to intelligently assign IRQ's to cards, you will have to run your motherboard's BIOS Setup and explicitly tell it about the card's IRQ line.
  Usually, there is a menu describing IRQ and DMA assignment, and you need to specify that the card's IRQ should be reserved for "Legacy ISA", or something similar.

Setting up the driver

• The card uses the "aha152x" scsi driver. Make sure that this driver is compiled into your kernel, or (better yet) compiled as a kernel module.
• This card has no autodetection features (it is as "dumb" as they get), so you will need to tell the driver where it is. There are a couple of ways to do this.

  If the driver is compiled into the kernel:

  Add the following line somewhere in your lilo.conf file:

  append = "aha152x=0xaddr,IRQ"

  where addr is the Base I/O address, and IRQ is the IRQ number.
  For example:

  append = "aha152x=0x140,9"

  If the driver is compiled as a module:

  Add the following line to the /etc/conf.modules file:

  options aha152x aha152x=0xaddr,IRQ

  just as above.
  OR
  Supply the magic configuration argument when you load the module by hand:

  modprobe aha152x aha152x=0xaddr,IRQ

• Remember that the scanner has to be turned on when the driver scans the SCSI bus. This means when you boot your machine, if the driver is built into the kernel, or when you load the module.

  However, it is possible to manually add a device to the driver's list at a later time by executing something like:

  cat "scsi add-single-device 0 0 ID# 0" > /proc/scsi/scsi

  where ID# should be replaced by the SCSI ID number dialed-in to the back of your scanner.

Did it work?

The most reliable way to see if this worked is to look in /proc/scsi...

First, try ls /proc/scsi/. You should get something like:

     ~> ls /proc/scsi/
     aha152x  scsi

Good... that means the driver *is* loaded. Now try cat /proc/scsi/scsi to see what it sees:

     ~> cat /proc/scsi/scsi
     Attached devices:
     Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 04 Lun: 00
       Vendor:          Model: Scanner 600      Rev: 1.90
       Type:   Scanner                          ANSI SCSI revision: 02

If you *don't* see your scanner listed, something is wrong. Otherwise, everything is A-OK, as far as the SCSI drivers go. Any further problems are SANE's fault.... :)