[sane-devel] Please correct documentation!

[kilgota at banach.math.auburn.edu]

Hi,

I am a subscriber to this list for a long time, but I am not active in 
scanner development stuff so do not usually contribute. However, I also 
use Slackware (usually run the "current" tree, but now using the latest 
because "current" is temporarily inactive). I typically compile my own 
kernels to support just my own hardware and setup, too.

I also bit the bullet recently and went over to using udev instead of 
hotplug, because the more recent 2.6 kernels simply do not like hotplug 
anymore.

As I said, I am not using a scanner very much, but I had to face 
immediately the issue of making my gphoto stuff to work, because I am 
actively involved in gphoto development. Here is more or less what I 
found, and perhaps it is relevant:

1. It is easy once you know what you are doing. ;)

2. Gphoto provides a script to run which creates a file called 
libgphoto2.rules which one puts into /etc/udev/rules.d and I also find 
there a file called libsane.rules because I have an old scanner around so 
I installed sane (but haven't used the scanner so I do not know if it 
works well or not).

In the libsane.rules each entry starts with a line such as (from the first 
entry)

SYSFS{idVendor}=="03f0", SYSFS{idProduct}=="0101", MODE="660",
GROUP="scanner"

(all on one line, above, in case the mailer munges it).

and as I said I do not know if that works. But if you want it to work then 
at least you have to have a group called "scanner" and whoever is going to 
use the scanner has to belong to the group called "scanner". If you do not 
have a group called "scanner" (check /etc/group to see if there is a group 
called "scanner" or not) then you need to create one. If you do have such 
a group then you need to add yourself (or whoever) as member of the 
group. Well, actually, I did set up an old box at work recently, with a 
2.6.19 kernel, as a dedicated machine to run the scanner and it does find 
the scanner just fine.

If you do not want to mess with a group called "scanner" you can do a 
hand-created file. Here is a similar line from my libgphoto2.rules file 
(file was hand-created by me, using the script in the libgphoto distro for 
creating it and I assume that sane has some similar facility):

SYSFS{idVendor}=="093a", SYSFS{idProduct}=="010f", GROUP="users"

and I know it works because I have one of those cameras and I am the 
one who wrote the support library for it.

And as I said, there is some point with a 2.6 kernel at which hotplug 
quits working. Somewhere around 2.6.16 or 2.6.17 and after that one has no 
choice but to use udev. As I said, that has been my experience but YMMV.


3. You might try upgrading your Slackware distro if you are running a 2.6 
kernel anyway. There might be some kind of problem with libusb; the latest 
version used now in Slackware is libusb-0.1.12-i486-1.

4. Good luck. Seems to me it all ought to work.

Theodore Kilgore


On Sun, 7 Jan 2007, Felix E. Klee wrote:

> At Sun, 07 Jan 2007 18:29:57 +0100,
> Julien BLACHE wrote:
>> If hotplug works out of the box, then don't worry about that ;)
>
> It works out of the box, and I don't worry. :-)
>
> Still, some time, I'd like to find out what is going on and how to fix
> the udev installation on my system.
>
>> (still it's amazing to see a distro where udev is so old that it
>> doesn't work out of the box for USB devices)
>
> It's Slackware 10.2 whose default kernel is a 2.4 kernel.  Nonetheless,
> one may use certain 2.6 kernels and one is even included with Slackware
> 10.2, in an optional package.  However, Slackware's udev *may* not
> actually be to blame.  Some time ago, I installed Dropline Gnome, a set
> of additional packages, that - as I just found out - also include a udev
> package which replaces the original Slackware one.  Also, I don't use
> the Slackware 2.6 kernel package.  Instead a slightly newer kernel that
> I compiled myself.
>
> Perhaps, I'll remove Dropline Gnome again, but not at the moment.
>
> -- 
> Felix E. Klee
>
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