SCX-4521F and Raspberry Pi: suggestions?

[Lx]

My goal is to make my USB-only Samsung SCX-4521F accessible over the network for printing and scanning purposes.

To avoid having to keep a power-hungry PC on, I've decided to set up a 512MB Raspberry Pi with the latest known soft-float ("armel") Debian distribution (Wheezy, found here).  I figure that if I can get printing and scanning working locally from the Pi, I can worry about the networking element later.

On the Raspberry Pi I have the following driver options:

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suld-driver2-1.00.06 - Samsung Unified Linux Driver2
suld-driver2-1.00.21 - Samsung Unified Linux Driver2
suld-driver2-1.00.27 - Samsung Unified Linux Driver2
suld-driver2-1.00.29 - Samsung Unified Linux Driver2

and I've tried them all (explicitly restarting saned each time I've changed the driver).  With drivers 1.00.27 and 1.00.29 I can't see the scanner at all:

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# scanimage -L

No scanners were identified. If you were expecting something different,
check that the scanner is plugged in, turned on and detected by the
sane-find-scanner tool (if appropriate). Please read the documentation
which came with this software (README, FAQ, manpages).

With drivers 1.00.06 and 1.00.21 I can see the scanner:

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# scanimage -L
device `smfp:usb;04E8;3419;8P54BAIQ223032B.' is a SAMSUNG SCX-4x21 Series on USB Scanner

and when I try to scan, some physical activity happens within the scanner, but the operation fails within a second or so:

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# time scanimage --device-name='smfp:usb;04e8;3419;8P54BAIQ223032B.' > out.pnm
scanimage: sane_start: Error during device I/O

real    0m1.012s
user    0m0.090s
sys     0m0.010s

Frustratingly, I did manage to scan some individual pages earlier; I don't believe I've changed any other aspect of the system's configuration though.

My questions for anyone willing to suggest answers are as follows:

• Given that I can see the scanner with drivers 1.00.06 and 1.00.21, is it strange that I can't see it with the later 1.00.27 and 1.00.29 drivers?  (The list of supported printers doesn't help in this instance because I'm dealing with ARM.)
  
• Is anyone aware of what might have caused the scanning to temporarily work, but now not work under any of the available drivers?  (I'm doing everything as root for now in an attempt to rule out user permissions.)
  
• While I understand that ARM support is limited, are there any other suggestions for getting local scanning working on the Raspberry Pi?

[Lx]

After much frustration and little hope of advancement towards a solution, I gave up and resorted to connecting the unit to a full-scale PC via USB.

[ValdikSS]

I've set up modern (driverless) printing to SCX-4521F on Orange Pi One with Debian 12 (Armbian), all without proprietary drivers.
All it took:

• Install CUPS (apt install cups)
• Install SPLIX printing driver (apt install printer-driver-splix)
• Install Avahi (apt install avahi-daemon)
• Configure printer using CUPS web interface (127.0.0.1:631) and enable sharing

And that's it. The printing is visible with auto-discovery and works from Android phone, from Linux and Windows PC, all without additional drivers or configuration on the phone/PCs.

Scanning requires some additional steps. There's a bug in xerox_mfp backend which needs to be fixed first: https://gitlab.com/sane-project/backends/-/issues/706
And there are additional patches which got merged only today (27 Sep 2023): https://gitlab.com/sane-project/backends/-/issues/707
With these patches, sane would work correctly.

You can either share the scanner with sane network capabilities itself, or you can install AirSane driverless (AirPrint) solution, as well as scanservjs web interface.