Scanner working under 2.6 (Shallow Thoughts)

Scanner working under 2.6

My Epson 2400 Photo scanner is finally working again. It used to work beautifully under 2.4, but since the scanner.o module disappeared in 2.6 and sane started needing libusb, I haven't been able to get it to work. (sane-find-scanner would see the scanner, but scanimage -L would not, even as root so it wasn't a permissions problem.)

Working with someone on #sane tonight (who was also having problems with libusb and 2.6) I finally discovered the trick: I had an old version of /etc/sane.d/epson.conf which used a line:

usb /dev/usb/scanner0

but I was completely missing a new, important, section which includes a line that says simply

usb

preceeded by a couple of all important comment lines:

# For any system with libusb support
# (which is pretty much any
# recent Linux distribution) the
# following line is sufficient.

So I replaced the old libusbscanner script with the new one, commented out scsi, left /dev/usb/scanner0 commented out, and uncommented the standalone usb line. And voila, it worked!

<geeky_hotplug_details>
The old /etc/hotplug/usb/epson.scanner script (which I'd gotten from a SANE help page long ago) was no longer being called, since it's been replaced by libusbscanner. The main function of either of these scripts is to do a chown/chmod on the scanner device, so that non-root users can use it. An interesting variation on this is a bugzilla attachment which changes scanner ownership to the person who is currently logged in on the console. Might be worth doing on a multiuser system (not an issue for my own desktop).

I have a line for my scanner in /etc/hotplug/usb.usermap (and indeed that's the only line in that file):

libusbscanner 0x0003 0x04b8 0x011b 0x0000 0x0000 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00000000

which is probably redundant with the 0x04b8 0x011b line in libsane.usermap (/etc/hotplug/usb.agent, which gets called whenever a USB hotplug event occurs, looks at usb.usermap and also usb/*.usermap)
</geeky_hotplug_details>

Tags: linux, imaging
[ 19:03 Nov 22, 2004    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]