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I moved from Ubuntu 12.10 to 14.04 and have a Canon Canoscan LiDE 25. It worked fine with Xsane on 12.10.

Now I have the strange effect that I can use the scanner with scanimage all the time, but as soon as I use Xsane or any other frontend, it only produces black images (the scanner does not move at all). Occasionally, I can scan once (mostly preview) and the second attempt produces only black again. I can use scanimage afterwards and it is fine.

Seems to be a kind of reset problem to me, because when Xsane comes up and the scanner makes a short noise, the first scan works. Also when I scan, the scan arm does not return to the start position. Afterwards, it creates black images.

The reset problem occurs with other front-ends as well.

Suggestions welcome. Running the latest 1.0.25 sane version (compiled from source). Also the default install did not work before, hence I tried my luck with latest. Changed the cable too as suggested in other threads, but not change.

  • libsane now: 1.0.25git, Kernel 3.13.0
  • libsane was: 1.0.22, Kernel 3.2.0

Any debug help welcome.

René Schwietzke
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  • Have you tried `gscan2pdf`? Please specify the `libsane` version on 12.10, and the versions you are trying to use. Also the corresponding kernels. Using the versions from 12.04 is probably an option, if only as a temporary debugging measure. – Faheem Mitha Mar 22 '15 at 13:01
  • gscan2pdf shows the same behavior. It is not the sane version I think because scanimage works fine. So it must be the usage of sane somehow. – René Schwietzke Mar 22 '15 at 15:48
  • Note: backporting in such cases is generally an option, and preferable to installing from source. Note: my earlier suggestion was to forwardport everything from 12.10 and see if that solved the problem. I think sane is reasonably self-contained, so that is probably doable. – Faheem Mitha Mar 22 '15 at 15:51
  • Got closer. Disabling USB autosuspend seems to be the solution. – René Schwietzke Mar 22 '15 at 15:56

1 Answers1

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Ok. Solved the mystery myself. It is related to USB autosuspend. It seems to kick in too early and the UIs do not wakeup the device properly, only scanimage does it.

I use TLP to control powersaving settings. So I got the device id using lsusb and added it to the USB_BLACKLIST line. Works as expected right now.

Took my 10 hours to figure it out, because similar cases had always some different reasons or stayed unanswered.

René Schwietzke
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  • What is this tlp? – Faheem Mitha Mar 22 '15 at 16:13
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    TLP brings you the benefits of advanced power management for Linux without the need to understand every technical detail. TLP comes with a default configuration already optimized for battery life, so you may just install and forget it. Nevertheless TLP is highly customizable to fulfil your specific requirements. http://linrunner.de/en/tlp/tlp.html – René Schwietzke Mar 22 '15 at 16:14
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    This was cross-posted on askubuntu.com at http://askubuntu.com/questions/599694/scanimage-works-but-xsane-or-any-other-ui-does-not. Please mention that as you go. – Cbhihe Jun 21 '15 at 10:11