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 <code>no devices available</code> error when running xsane as a normal user.<br />
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This article assumes you are using the 2.6 kernel, I'm not sure if these instructions will work for 2.4.<br />
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The solution is to add a group called scanner and make yourself a member of that group, so add the following line to <code>/etc/group</code><pre>scanner:x:103:andrew</pre>Choose any unused group number (103 was the first available to me) and replace <code>andrew</code> with your username.<br />
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Now it's almost ready to work. There are two things left to do:<br />
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1) Since udev was started before you created the scanner group it doesn't know about it, so you have to restart udev: <code>/etc/rc.d/rc.udev restart</code> Now after you plug in the scanner, the scanner group will have read/write permissions to the device file (it's something like <code>/dev/usbdev2.2</code>)<br />
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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.<br />
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Now xsane is going to work, enjoy.