It appears that there might be a permissions problem here. When root runs "sane-find-scanner", sane can pick the proper backend but when a regular user runs the same command, it can't locate the backend.

sane-find scanner by root...

as user...

Shouldn't a regular user be able to scan??

A regular user should be able to scan. But I ran into problems with Xsane myself running as a user other than root and had problems. Nathan already knows, and is working on this issue. For now, you'll just have to do "su root" to get it working.

You have to remember, Grafpup is built on Puppy, and Puppy was not a multi-user Linux. Nathan has worked hard to turn that from a single, root, user Linux into the mult-user Grafpup, and has done very well. But there are issues that still need to be worked out, and Nathan will get it straightened out.

Is the user in the scanner group?

Grafpup doesn't come with a "scanner" group. I added the following line to /etc/groups file..

where Gary is a user. I also changed the "group" for the /dev/usb/scanner0 and scanner1 devices to "scanner" but still no scanning for user "gary"

Joey is essentially correct in his assessment, and yes I am aware of the problem. Unfortunately I have not been able to devote any time to it yet.

I try to keep groups a little less polluted than most distros. What I mean by that is that it is usually not really needed to have a separate group for all functions. For instance, there is no "cdrom" or "cdburning" group. Instead, the device node for your burning drive is just set to be read/write for everybody. I could tighten this a little bit of course, by changing it's ownership to the "users" group and just make it group writable, and not writable for the rest of the world.

It might work to do this for the scanner device, but I don't know yet. This is the theory behind the "scanner" group anyway. I would try changing the permissions of the device node so that it is owned by the group "users" and read/write by the same group. If that does not work the you could then try changing the ownership back to root:root and making it read/write for world.

If this can't be resolved this way I have a few other ideas, having gone through similar problems with cdrecord before finally switching to wodim. But if someone does try my suggestions please do let me know how you get on.

Nathan

I believe I had the same problem as you, but on a debian machine. This is where I found the solution that worked for me:

http://www.wuglug.org.uk/tutorials/desktop/usbscanning

the sentence to read is:

"... you can just change permissions on /proc/bus/usb/blah/blah yourself
(if it's libusb:x:y, it'll be /proc/bus/usb/x/y)"

apparently there is a usb-permission-deamon that does this automatically (useful, since the device will be on a different bus every time you plug it in)

Thought this might be helpful to users of other operating systems that have the same problem as me and find this thread in google.