sane: conflicting advice man sane-usb/howto
 

Have posted before but now have more info.
Artec E+Pro scanner, was previously detected by scanimage -L (but not available to sane) but now "no scanners detected". The tdlp howto was written in 2004 I think so treated as a starting point only. And "Therefore, for the rest of this article we assume the use of the kernel scanner driver (tdlp howto)." contrasted with "the kernel scanner driver is deprecated & shouldn't be used anymore (man sane-usb)" leaves me a bit confused- especially since man lib-usb doesn't tell me how to proceed if scanimage -L isn't working. Please suggest where to go for advice? Thanks

http://www.sane-project.org/cgi-bin/...&bus=any&v=&p=
... the sane project website.

Artec E+ Pro is listed as having "minimal" support with the sane-artec_eplus48u backend.

The maintainers call it "Experimental!" and want to hear from you.

Thanks, I have followed instructions to file a bug report on alioth.debian.org.

For those who follow: when you are in the enviable position to select hardware for your linux box, it is good to make note of the selection at your retailer that interests you, then research them, before making your selection.

There is a very large amount of supported HW... had this scanner, for eg, been the next version, it would have worked. For some reason, retailers seem to stock the one model in the range which is like that - and at a low price.

Teaches you something about marketing...

Thanks for advice & will do so in future (bought this scanner long before I knew about Linux). Looking at the alioth site, I feel sure that this is not going to be a priority issue for them- there was only I previous bug report for an Artec scanner & it wasn't an E+pro so... to use my scanner for now it's back to XP on another box. Not a problem.

As an exercise I'd like to try & modify the backend driver. This might help me get over other usb hardware issues (i.e. the only problem I have with Debian). I can take a look at the Windows driver as a starting point. Could you suggest anything eg where to go for general (& hopefully newbie suitable)advice on driver files? Cheers.

Go to the development site and use their source code... if you want to try modifying the driver, they really want to hear from you.

The solution
 

wasn't too much trouble in the end but the manuals and howtos weren't easy. /etc/sane.d/artec_eplus48u.conf pointed to /usr/share/sane/artec_eplus48u/1200.usb" which was not present, i.e. the windows firmware file mentioned briefly in manual pages from sane. I copied the file from my cd and made the required directory, & contacted sane with the result. Thanks for your help on this "project"!