[sane-devel] Updating sane-backends

[Richard M. Teitel]

I am in desperate need of advice from people more knowledgable than I 
(which means most, if not all, of you) about the workings of Linux.

I was advised by several people (Henning Meir-Geinitz and Gerhart Jaeger 
in particular) that most of my problems with the UMAX scanner using the 
Plustek backend would be resolved if I upgraded my sane-backends from 
version 1.0.8 to version 1.0.11.  I much appreciate the advice.  So I 
downloaded the sane-backends -1.0.11 tar file and attempted to install 
it.  When I ran ./configure, I got the following warning:

*** WARNING: SANE is already installed (version 1.0.8). The old
*** installation is at /usr while SANE will now be installed
*** at /usr/local. It is recommended to uninstall the old SANE version
*** before installing the new one to avoid problems.

So I tried to uninstall the old version with

rpm -e sane-backends-1.0.8

 and got the following response:

error: Failed dependencies:
        libsane.so.1 is needed by (installed) sane-frontends-1.0.8-4
        libsane.so.1 is needed by (installed) xsane-0.84-8
        libsane.so.1 is needed by (installed) xsane-gimp-0.84-8
        sane-backends = 1.0.8 is needed by (installed) 
sane-frontends-1.0.8-4

(libsane.so.1 is a link to libsane.so.1.0.8, which is in the same directory)

In other words (or so it would appear), I can't install the new files 
until I uninstall the old ones, and I can't uninstall the old ones 
because of the dependencies.

Can someone please offer a suggestion?  I would prefer not to have to 
uninstall and reinstall sane-frontends, xsane and gimp in order to 
update the backends files.  Or better yet, is there a way to upgrade the 
Plustek driver, without disturbing anything else?

Oh, BTW, I am running Red Hat Linux 2.4.18-14 on an Intel Pentium III 
with a UMAX Astra 3400 scanner connected to the USB port.

Thanks for the help,
Rich Teitel