Parallel port scanner works, almost.
 

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.

Thanks in advance.

Edit; Oh yeah, Slackware10, kernel 2.6.8.1

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...

Any suggestions? Anybody?

have you changed permission in the /dev/ for users to use it ?? (may sound stupid, but sometimes u forgot....)

Yeah, I've tried changing permissions on /dev/parport0 but no luck. I'm sure there's a simple fix, but I haven't figure it out yet.

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.

No more Windows for me...
:D