Setting up a scanner in Slackware

Posted by: Andrew Smith
Poster contact info: andrew-smith at mail ru
Author: same as 'Posted by'
Software: Slackware 11, xsane All

Setting up a scanner is a very annoying thing without this guide. You will find that by default it works for root but not for a regular user. Before following this guide you are probably getting a no devices available error when running xsane as a normal user.

This article assumes you are using the 2.6 kernel, I'm not sure if these instructions will work for 2.4.

The solution is to add a group called scanner and make yourself a member of that group, so add the following line to /etc/group
scanner:x:103:andrew
Choose any unused group number (103 was the first available to me) and replace andrew with your username.

Now it's almost ready to work. There are two things left to do:

1) Since udev was started before you created the scanner group it doesn't know about it, so you have to restart udev: /etc/rc.d/rc.udev restart Now after you plug in the scanner, the scanner group will have read/write permissions to the device file (it's something like /dev/usbdev2.2)

2) You added yourself to the scanner group but the shell doesn't know it yet, so unfortunately you have to log out and log back in. There is probably a way to avoid logging out but I don't know it.

Now xsane is going to work, enjoy.