[sane-devel] Scanner Basics

[Karl F. Larsen]

	If you load Red Hat 8.0 Linux and look around you will see a Sane
button under Imaging and it's so easy to just click this and in general it
comes up and you say yes to the license thing and then it says "can't find
Scanner".

	Now what?

	If your very persistent you will join the Sane list and be told a
lot of stuff that is good but confusing. Then your told the secret. The
secret is to divide and win. The first thing to do is make sure Sane can
FIND the scanner. 

	The writers of Sane made a very important tool. It is software
called "sane-find-scanner". This software lets you divide the problem into
parts. Now I don't care whether my scanner works, I'm just going to make
sure SANE CAN FIND MY SCANNER.

	The next step is to look for the scanner. In a Terminal window make
it a super user with su- and provide your root password. Now type this:

		sane-find-scanner <Enter>

It will either print out some words but have zero information, or it will
find the scanner. The out put when a scanner is found looks like this:

# Note that sane-find-scanner will find any scanner that is connected
# to a SCSI bus and some scanners that are connected to the Universal
# Serial Bus (USB) depending on your OS. It will even find scanners
# that are not supported at all by SANE. It won't find a scanner that
# is connected to a parallel or proprietary port.

# You may want to run this program as super-user to find all devices.
# Once you found the scanner devices, be sure to adjust access
# permissions as necessary.

sane-find-scanner: found USB scanner (vendor = 0x04b8, product = 0x010f) 
at device /dev/usb/scanner0

	Please notice that the last line that starts sane-find-scanner:
lists all the data about your scanner so you KNOW Sane has found the scanner
you want to use. Of course This is my scanner and it's plugged into the
first USB port /dev/usb/scanner0

	Now to get to this happy point you will need to do perhaps a lot of
things. There is a lot of help in the manuals you can reach by typing man
sane in your terminal. Depending on the type of scanner you will need to do
some tricky stuff. First read man sane and it will lead you to, in my case
man-usb. There I learned how to find out the numbers that represent my
scanner. 

	Then I tried to remove the scanner module with "rmmod scanner" and
discovered it was not even loaded! I then did cat /proc/bus/usb/devices and
learned my Epson scanner has the number 0x04b8 and my model is 0x01f. Then
following the information in the man page I used modprobe to load scanner
with the scanner data. It looks like:

	modprobe scanner vendor=0x04b8 product=0x01f

Before I did this sane-find-scanner found nothing. After it found my
scanner. I will put this line into the /ect/rc.d/rc.local file so I don't
have to type it in every time.

	So my new condition is this: My scanner still does not work, but now
I know Sane does find my scanner, and now the question is why does it not
work?
  

-- 
                      
               - Karl Larsen k5di Las Cruces,NM Az ScQRPions -