Brother MFC-240C Scanner & xsane problems on Ubuntu

I have Ubuntu 9.04 running on a Dell Vostro 1000 and some time back, had configured Brother MFC-240C to scan & print. However, when I tried to scan some pictures yesterday, I was not getting any images at all! I tried with different pictures just to be sure and sometimes I got strange blobs. As I was qorking on solving this issue, I faced a set of problems and here's how I solved them ...


I tried to plug-in the MFC to different ports to check if it was a specific USB port problem but that did not help. On the contrary, I got the errors:

• Failed to start scanner: Error during device I/O
• Bus XXX Device XXX: Device not found
• Failed to start scanner: Invalid Argument

These were resolved when I powered down the MFC before unplugging it and then powered it back up after plugging it in to another port.


After a while of playing around, I got the error:
Error during CMS conversion. could not open scanner ICM profile.
I realised that while playing with the scanner settings, I had inadvertantly enabled "Color Management". Unchecking "Preferences > Enable Color Management" resolved this issue but that does not end the story yet!


A search on ubuntu forums and google in general showed that many people had faced these same problems before and so I was flabbergasted when even after trying all this, the scanner was working but again I was not getting any images at all?!


After a bit of poking around, it just struck me to check whether the temp space had finished. And lo behold - I had used up almost all the available space in /tmp as well as root - the usage was 100%! Due to this, xsane was not able to save the image data sent by the scanner. Clearing up space in root and tmp finally resolved the problem and I got the scanned images perfectly now!



Check out the specs & reviews of Brother MFC-240C on Amazon: