One step further away from
One step further away from being a Linux virgin! I finally managed to get my old workhorse HP Scanjet IIcx (which must be at least 10 years old by now) working under Redhat 7.0. I would be lying if I said it was plain sailing, but it was at least relatively easy - every time I hit upon a problem, a few trawls of websites and newsgroups came up with an answer. There are still a few niggling error messages cropping up here and there, but none that seem to prevent the thing from working.
I started by downloading and installing RPM (Redhat Package Manager) files, as I thought that would automate things and make it nice’n'easy - WRONG! I ended up having to try and remove the installed files (which wasn’t so easy - I think there are still vestiges left which confuse the system from time to time), download the source files and compile (yes, compile) and make my own binaries. Woo. That’ll put hairs on my chest. Don’t think I’ve compiled anything from the command line since Borland C days in about 1993. Actually, I’m making it sound a lot more macho than it is - all I had to do was type ./config and then make and then make install and there the bloody thing was! Well, more or less.
Other stuff I had to do was add the library path to my /etc/ld.so.conf file, run /sbin/ldconfig to make the changes take effect, find the SCSI ID that my scanner was sitting on and run chmod a+rw /dev/sg1 to make that port read-writable for users other than root. Easy when you know how (I didn’t). And now I have SANE and XSANE ticking along nicely. Just need to get the Linux machine talking to my rather more graphics-friendly Windows machines and the cycle will be complete.
Oh, I was also rather surprised at what was underneath the cover of the scanner - this mess - which means that I haven’t used it in over 6 months (been using Gill’s little HP 2100C instead, but it’s only A4 and HP don’t make and don’t plan to make drivers for Win2k, so I’ve had to abandon that).
