Linux - HardwareThis forum is for Hardware issues.
Having trouble installing a piece of hardware? Want to know if that peripheral is compatible with Linux?
Notices
Welcome to LinuxQuestions.org, a friendly and active Linux Community.
You are currently viewing LQ as a guest. By joining our community you will have the ability to post topics, receive our newsletter, use the advanced search, subscribe to threads and access many other special features. Registration is quick, simple and absolutely free. Join our community today!
Note that registered members see fewer ads, and ContentLink is completely disabled once you log in.
If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us. If you need to reset your password, click here.
Having a problem logging in? Please visit this page to clear all LQ-related cookies.
Get a virtual cloud desktop with the Linux distro that you want in less than five minutes with Shells! With over 10 pre-installed distros to choose from, the worry-free installation life is here! Whether you are a digital nomad or just looking for flexibility, Shells can put your Linux machine on the device that you want to use.
Exclusive for LQ members, get up to 45% off per month. Click here for more info.
The last step to totally migrating to Linux is getting my scanner to work properly... I know that parallel port scanner support is a bit flaky, but this is starting to really bug me.
I've got an old OpticPro 4800P that works with the plustek_pp backend for sane, sometimes. The plustek_pp backend works with my webcam just fine.
As root, when I run scanimage -L, it sometimes picks up the scanner, but generally I have to run the command several times. Trying xsane, kooka, xscanimage all get about the same result.; after several attempts they will start. When a prescan fails in xsane I get an error "Failed to start scanner:Error during device I/O".
The CLI error is "(xsane:8441): Gdk-CRITICAL **: file gdkwindow.c: line 2140 (gdk_window_process_updates): assertion `window != NULL' failed"
I've set my parallel port in bios to EPP as suggested in the man pages.
And I can't for the life of me get permissions for users other than root. I've tired changing permissions on /dev/parport0 but that didn't seem right and made no difference so I changed them back to defaults. My understanding of permissions is a bit hazy, obviously.
Any suggestions or info on how to get the scanner to work properly, and how to change permissions to allow users without adding a new group as described in the man pages would be great... If I can get this working I will officially be in a Windows Free Environment.
For anyone having the same issue, (not likely though, probably), I solved the intermittent scanner problem by removing the lp module from the kernel...
Scanner works just fine as root, but I still can't get it to work as a user other than root...
The answer to the root only problem is to use saned. I found out that some scanners, (like mine) access the parallel port directly, which is only possible for root, and you can't open permissions for normal users.
So I configured saned, and I'm scanning as a user, no problem.
LinuxQuestions.org is looking for people interested in writing
Editorials, Articles, Reviews, and more. If you'd like to contribute
content, let us know.