Permission? problem in sane?
 

I was following along the sane man pages for my Mustek 1200CP parallel port scanner. (P4/1.7GHz, 1GB RAM, Fedora Core 3) So far, so good. The only problem is, I can only scan something if I am signed on as root or have done an su and entered my password. Even then it whines about "Do you REALLY want to scan this as root because you're risking your firstborn child" or something like that. If I try to use gimp or any of the GUI widgets as a regular user, I am out of luck. It says it can't find any scanner devices.

All this leads me to think this is a permissions problem (isn't it always a permissions problem?). When I "Click Here to Find Similar Threads" the solution seems to be "su first, then it works". Is there an elegant solution or am I stuck with the nag box?

Should I change the permissions on everything with "sane" in the name? Could it be as simple as one directory? I don't care, I just want this scanner to work with a minimum of hassle.

Thanks in advance for all advice.

In a modern distro this is as easy as adding your user to the scanner group. May I advise against using a dead distro?

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=524803

Thanks for the response.

Well, sure, advise away. FC3 was new when I installed it. I simply haven't taken the downtime to upgrade. Up to now, it has done everything I needed it to do.

Soooo.... Does that mean Fedora Core 3 is not modern enough to have a scanner group?

What is a scanner group and where do I find one?

No it doesn't. I simply do not know a thing about FC business. In Gentoo scanner group is created automatically when SANE is installed, all I had to do was to add my user to this group.

Permission? problem in SANE? persists
 

Despite extensive searching, I cannot find a scanner group.

Is there something else I can do to allow normal users to access the scanner? (Ideally, without the downtime associated with updating my distro...) Currently, only root or users with the su password can use the scanner.

Thanks in advance for any further help!

What are the permissions of your scanner device? You may need to create this group,
add a line to your /etc/group
scanner:x:410:yourusername.

Permission? problem in sane?
 

I did, and nothing has changed. I still have to "su" to use xsane. None of the GUIs, such as The GIMP, function.

Any other suggestions?

Look, this is only one half of solution. In order the scanner group to work the scanner device must belong to this group. In a modern distro it is done using udev. Again, have no clue how to do it in FC3. Is udev used in FC3? If not you may try to chown the scanner device.

Thanks for all your help! Being halfway there is very good news indeed!

Yes, udev exists. Unfortunately, as usual, the man pages were more confusing than helpful. I edited /etc/udev/permissions.d/50-udev.permissions. I found the following lines:
# scanner devices
scanner:root:root:0600
usb/scanner*:root:root:0600

The numbers at the end appear to be permissions. I changed 0600 to 0777 for the two lines shown, but this still doesn't help my scanner problem. What else should I try? Do I need to change the printer permissions, too, since this is a parallel port scanner?

You may check parport permissions. Sorry, can't help you from here, I have no similar equipment.

Permission? problem in sane?
 

Does anyone else have any further advice? If you have a solution to this problem, please post it here! Thanks.