hi guys,

i have been trying for a loooong time to have this scanner work, but to no avail.
searching forums did not exclude it from possibly working, but could not find a definitive answer, nor a solution.
in the past i tried to have it work under ubuntu, with no luck, and now i'm trying again the exercise with Fedora 14. my kernel is 2.6.35.11-83.fc14.i686.PAE
i have SANE-backends-1.0.21-6.fc14 (i686) installed

under lshw i get a strange response:
*-usb:2 UNCLAIMED
description: Generic USB device
product: USB2.0 Scanner
vendor: Hewlett-Packard.
physical id: 5
bus info: usb@1:5
version: 1.00
capabilities: usb-2.00
configuration: maxpower=100mA speed=480Mbit/s
as if the scanner gets wrongly interpreted as an HP

which actually seems confirmed by the last lines of dmesg:
[ 8816.233030] usb 1-5: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 5
[ 8816.349444] usb 1-5: New USB device found, idVendor=055f, idProduct=040b
[ 8816.349448] usb 1-5: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
[ 8816.349451] usb 1-5: Product: USB2.0 Scanner
[ 8816.349453] usb 1-5: Manufacturer: Hewlett-Packard.


but lsusb apparently sees the device correctly:
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 055f:040b Mustek Systems, Inc.

any ideas?

if you were to suggest instructions please bear in mind that i'm a fairly noob user

According to Sane, that scanner is not supported, yet. See this link.

http://www.sane-project.org/sane-mfgs.html#Z-MUSTEK

I looked for the ID, 055f:040b. It is a 'BearPaw 6400 TA Pro' according to the ID. I know how frustrating this lack of scanner driver is. I installed V-box, installed an XP system, and use my scanner in XP in a virtual machine as a work around, until there is a driver for mine.

thanks for that.
at least searching for the id i could find a few more discussions than in previous searches, and found out that... there's no news on this since april last year
this at least was the most complete discussion i found so far:
http://old.nabble.com/Mustek-ScanExp...html#a31099489

i'll retry the VM solutions with rel.4. in rel 3.8 it was not working....

cheers!

V-box can be a little tricky to get all things working. I have run mine on both versions. I had problems getting USB working. Once I sorted that out, both versions work for me.

i made it!

had a few troubles installing VB4.04 on fedora (couldn't have done without the online help in chat of a friend) and a few twitches on the USB settings:
- it was identifying the scanner as an HP instead than a Mustek, which in the end was irrelevant;
- the need to install the VBox extensions (and i installed the guest additions inside the VM too, although i could not find out if they were strictly necessary)
- adding the device USB filter to the VM and enabling 2.0 controls (i know that's obvious for normal users, but it was not for me and could be necessary info for newbies)
- the final need to set a silly parameter "remote" to any, by modifying the USB filter after having it set up. this was the last mile for me, and i found it, funnily, in a windows tutorial....

thx again

You are most welcome, I glad you had success. Happy scanning.