[sane-devel] xsane/plustek timeouts (was: xane timeout if do scan after preview)

[Henning Meier-Geinitz]

Hi,

On Mon, Jan 27, 2003 at 10:41:46PM +0000, Steven King wrote:
>  I've been experimenting some more. The problem is not when I scan after I 
> preview, it is if I scan after changing the scan area. My earlier experiments 
> had a small image on the flatbed, and so the scan area was being amended 
> automatically. I can scan as much as I want, but only if I avoid changing the 
> scan area. Not great.. Any clues?

I'm neither an xsane nor plustek expert but I'll try to give some
general hints. I've changed the subject so maybe the maintainers find
the message and notice the pattern of your problem.

> (If this is a known problem in xsane 0.84, then I will do the upgrade, I just 
> don't want to do it only to find it makes no difference.)

I don't think it's realted to xsane. But to make sure, you could try
other frontends like xscanimage or quiteinsane. Or, as you proposed,
upgrade xsane.

> I do a scan preview, and this works well. Then I do an actual scan, and this
> fails. By "fails", I mean: the scanner jolts a bit and after a while I get
> "usb_control/bulk_msg: timeout" in my console output. I have to restart linux
> to get the scanner available again.

Power-cycling the scanner and/or removing the usb scanner module is
not enough?

> When I do sane-find-scanner, it sees my scanner, which is at /dev/usbscanner.
> (Oddly, if I do that as root, it finds my scanner twice: once as
> /dev/usbscanner and once as /dev/usb/scanner0.)

Try "ls -l" on both device files. The'll probably have the same
major/minor numbers (180/48) but /dev/usb/scanner0 won't have access
permissions for your user.

That's most probably not the reason for your problem.

> The scanner is HP 2100C Scanjet

-> plustek backend

> My kernel is 2.4.10-4GB

That's quite old. I haven't heard of your problem but there is a small
chance that it's kernel related. I don't know if 2.4.10 already has
the option read_timeout. You could just try: rmmod scanner; modprobe
scanner read_timeout=120. That option sets the timeout to 120 seconds.

If everything else fails, try upgrading the kernel. The latest kernel
USB scanner driver is in Linux 2.4.21-pre4.

> sane backends 1.0.8-5

The current beta version is 1.0.10-pre3. You could try the new
version, in case it's a problem of the plustek backend.

> sane-frontends 1.0.8-4

Doesn't matter unless you use xscanimage.

> xsane 0.84-8 (after this version there are a lot of dependencies that I do
>  not have, and some are quite large to download, so I do not want to use them
>  if I can avoid it)
> 
> Any clues, please?

Use the source code of xsane. You'll need gtk, but I guess that's
installed anyway.

For the plustek maintainer a log file may help. Use

SANE_DEBUG_PLUSTEK=255 xsane 2>log.txt

And try to reproduce the error.

Bye,
  Henning