[Sussex] scanners

[Geoff Teale]

John,

First thing.. scanners are the final frontier in Linux hardware support, this 
is mainly because the existing standards for Scanners are all about how 
scanner drivers interact with applications and not about how scanner talk to 
the OS and thus the driver.

Anyhow... I've been trying to write a driver for a HP Scanject 4470c, with 
varied luck, for some time (this is now on hold until we can convince Realtek 
to release some chipset specs..), so I may be able to help here.

All of what you need to know is detailed if you do a:

[tealeg at beast tealeg]$man sane-ub

... but to help you out here's some steps to take to getting your scanner 
working:

0\ Become root:

[tealeg at beast tealeg]$su -

1\ mount the USB filesystem:
[root at beast root]$mount /proc/bus/usb


2\ Find out what devices show up in the USB filesystem:
[root at beast root]$cat /proc/bus/usb/devices

... if you don't see any output then you need to make sure you have the 
following modules loaded: usbcore, usb-xhci (either usb-uhci, usb-ohci or 
usb-ehci depending on your hardware) and scanner.  Once these are loaded 
retry the line above.

3\ Look through the output from the command, you should see a line that looks 
like:

P: vendor=04b8 ProdID=011d Rev=1.00

4\ OK, now you need to reload the scanner module so your using kernel support 
rather than libusb (as you text seemed to show).  To do this you do:

[root at beast root]$rmmod scanner
[root at beast root]$modprobe scanner vendor=0x4b8 product=0x011d

5\ Make a new user group called scanner and add your user into that group and 
then do the following:

[root at beast root]$chgrp scanner /dev/usb/scanner0
[root at beast root]$chmod 660 /dev/usb/scanner0

6\ Come back to your normal user:

[root at beast root]$exit

7\ We're getting back to familiar territory now:

[root at beast root]$sane-find-scanner

...assuming that works out OK, then you just do as the instructions you have 
tell you to!

-- 
GJT
Free Software Foundation
tealeg at member.fsf.org