[tlug] libusb and plustek sane-backend (1.0.13)

[Godwin Stewart <gstewart@example.com>]

Hi,

Now that I've got the drivers for my DXR3 MPEG2 decoder board working with
the 2.6.5 kernel it's time to switch over and leave 2.4.x behind. After a
few teething problems - like finding out the hard way that usb-uhci is now
uhci-hcd and wasting a couple of hours trying to figure out why there was
nothing under /proc/bus/usb - it's up and running smoothly. I still have to
see if sound works but that's low priority.

High priority is getting the fscking scanner working. Googling revealed that
the usb-scanner kernel module was dropped as of 2.6.3 and the user-space
libusb libraries should be used instead. So I removed the older packages
which were installed OOTB with the distro and grabbed latest from source,
compiled and installed.

$ sane-find-scanner

  # No SCSI scanners found. If you expected something different, make sure that
  # you have loaded a SCSI driver for your SCSI adapter.

found USB scanner (vendor=0x04b8, product=0x011d, chip=LM983x?) at libusb:001:002
  # Your USB scanner was (probably) detected. It may or may not be supported by
  # SANE. Try scanimage -L and read the backend's manpage.

  # Scanners connected to the parallel port or other proprietary ports can't be
  # detected by this program.

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

Okey dokey - sane knows to use libusb if present and it sees the scanner.

`lsusb` lists out the USB devices connected perfectly well too.

Having got this far I'm now up against a brick wall trying to get the
plustek sane-backend to use libusb instead of the old /dev/usb/scanner0.

Googling for sane-plustek and libusb returns about 10 results, all of which
obviously mention both criteria but most of them not in the same context.
Others say things like "if you're using libusb then don't bother reading
this" etc. None of them say that the plustek backend doesn't work with
libusb, but man sane-plustek says:

"Alternatively, the backend is able to access your scanner via libusb."

But doesn't say how. Grrrrrr.... Don't you love it how people think you
know this shit intuitively?

Normal syntax for pointing the backend to the scanner when using the
usb-scanner kernel module was:

device /dev/usb/scanner0

I tried:

device libusb:001:002

No dice.

What next?

-- 
G. Stewart   --   gstewart@example.com -- gstewart@example.com
Registered Linux user #284683 (Slackware 9.0, Linux 2.6.5)
--------------------------------------------------------------
"Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be President, but they
 don't want them to become politicians in the process."
            -- John F. Kennedy

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