It wasn't easy. I followed several paths that did not lead to nirvana. But now there is peace and harmony. My HP ScanJet 5200C is a tamed beast. The scanner is not only docile and compliant, but it speaks fluent USB. You may recall that in a recent column, I described my frustration with trying to get the scanner working. It had worked once -- though only partially and ever so briefly. But after I reinstalled everything so I could faithfully take notes and report my experiences in the column, I was unable to make the scanner work again.

My quest led me to try multiple versions of the kernel: from 2.2.18-x to test releases of 2.4. When they didn't bring relief, I changed distributions. I switched from Red Hat 7.0 to Debian Potato to SuSE 7.0 to Mandrake 7.2, to no avail.

But after receiving clues and inspiration from my local LUG's mailing list, I finally realized I had been looking in all the wrong places. It's the hardware, stupid, not the Linux kernel or the distribution. A bad motherboard. A very bad motherboard.

In the message that helped me, the author noted how easily he made the same scanner work using USB on Mandrake 7.2. No need to upgrade the kernel at all. After just a few simple steps (I'll go over the complete process later), he was enjoying his new scanner. Naturally, I misread the answer. I was still in my "blame the software" funk and concluded that if I just installed Mandrake 7.2, I could use my new scanner too.

I ran into town and picked up a copy of Mandrake 7.2. SuSE came off my system; Mandrake went on. I followed the mailing list's instructions to the letter. The results were different, but still not good. Instead of giving me segfaults when I started xscanimage, the application just sat there and did nothing.

Out of curiosity, I decided to run usbview. When I started it, an empty window appeared. But when I clicked on Refresh in the Usbview Menu, the screen filled with information about the scanner. Amazingly enough, accessing USB with usbview caused the xscanimage program to come unstuck.

The xscanimage opening screen appeared just a few seconds after I hit Refresh: very suspicious behavior. A tiny LED in the back of my head began to blink "Hardware Error!" But even after usbview's push start, xscanimage still would not work. When I tried to do a scan preview, xscanimage would start the preview and then freeze. I was becoming convinced that I was suffering from a case of bad iron.

I made another trip to town. A message on the mailing list had said

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