[sane-devel] Problems faxing from a scanner

[Henning Meier-Geinitz]

Hi,

On Sun, Mar 16, 2003 at 07:45:44PM -0500, Richard M. Teitel wrote:
> I am running Red Hat 8.0 kernel 2.4.18-14 on a 700MHZ Pentium III.  I 
> have a Conexant V.90/56k data/fax/voice/speakerphone (rev 08) PCI modem 
> card, for which I installed 
> hcfpcimodem-0.99mbsibeta02123100k2.4.18_14-1rh.i686.rpm for the driver. 

[...]

> The scanner inputs the page image nicely in B&W, and creates a 
> "faxproject."  I am then able to input the destination phone number, and 
> start the send process (using the "send faxproject" button on the Xsane 
> fax front end).  The system sends the cover page (even though it never 
> asks for any cover page input), then crashes without sending the scanned 
> page.  The crash consists of a total lockout of any input devices, 
> especially the keyboard and mouse.  The cursor stops blinking, the mouse 
> pointer disappears, and the "Caps Lock" and "Scroll Lock" lights flash. 

This is a kernel oops. It's caused by a kernel bug (or a hardware
issue but that's rather unlikely in this case). It's not a problem of
any userspace program.

> No keystrokes have any affect.  The only way I have found to recover is 
> to press the reset button on the tower, and reboot the system.  When it 
> has finished booting, my home page is completely fouled up.  The screen 
> is black, the font is about size 1 (unreadable), the X-windows Gnome 
> panel is at the top of the screen instead of the bottom.  I have not 
> been able to recover the preferred setup from this condition.

Check the settings for Gnome and GTK in your home directory. I guess
because of the crash one of your config files is corrupted. That
shouldn't ahppen if you use ext3 or another journaled filesystem.

> I am hoping that someone can suggest a way to isolate the problem.  Keep 
> in mind, the only way I have been able to recover from these crashes is 
> to reboot the OS.

Try to reproduce the bug by sending faxes like xsane does. I.e. check
whi ch options xsane uses for hylafax and use the same. If you do that
from the console (ctrl-alt-F1) you will even see the oops message
printed.

You can also use a serial console to see what happens (e.g. another
computer).

Try the same with scanning only. However, as the crash happens when
the scan is already over I think tha fax is the problem.

So you should probably contact the author of the driver for your fax
modem.

Bye,
  Henning