epson scanner - "out of memory"

[plutek]

greetings!

using an epson 4870 scanner with sane, i always get an "out of memory" error when trying to do a scan which would produce a file size large than available memory.

this happens regardless of what front-end i use -- xsane, xscanimage, and scanimage -- so i think it's a problem with the sane back-end. it doesn't matter whether "view" is on or off. even if i'm supposedly ONLY saving to a file, this happens.

any clues? surely we can write large scans directly to disk?

-p

[kKDu]

The problem is probably that you run out of your swap memory.

How big is your ram/swap memory?
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[plutek]

thanks.... yeah, my RAM is 1Gb and i've only got 500Mb swap at the moment. i could bump up the swap, but still, you seem to be implying that the whole thing has to fit in RAM+swap? a large colour page at hi resolution could easily get beyond what's reasonable for RAM and swap. there's no way to tell sane to just write the scan out to a file as it goes?

-p

[oldefortran]

Any solution to this problem?
free tells me

free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 905136 601812 303324 0 52304 407084
-/+ buffers/cache: 142424 762712
Swap: 1084376 0 1084376

and scanning is not working with my scsi scanner