I need help. SANE is making me crazy -- SANE, as in the Scanner Access Now Easy project. (See Resources for a link.) The problem is SANE via USB, actually. I had it working, honest. My brand new HP 5200C scanner was doing a fine job of scanning old photographs. I was using my new 750-MHz Athlon test machine, running Red Hat 7.0 with a test version of the Rawhide 2.4 kernel. I used xscanimage, for example, to get a copy of the photo you see below: my grandfather's service station and garage in Indiahoma, Okla., circa the early 1920s.

I was so thrilled that USB was working on my system, and by the prospect of being able to scan and preserve a lot of old family photos, that I decided then and there to write a column about it. Unfortunately, I had not taken thorough notes while I cobbled the thing together. I decided that the best thing to do was reinstall everything and write down every step. That would allow readers who were so inclined to do the same thing.

Besides, not everything was really working that well. When I tried to preview an image using XSane, the scanner started clattering so loudly, I thought it might destroy itself. I hoped a reinstall would fix that, so I wiped the disk clean and began anew, notebook in hand. That turned out to be a very big mistake.

A scanner darkly

Actually, the new hardware was a bit problematic before and after I reinstalled everything. I finally tracked down the problem: a bad DIMM. It caused the system to lock up at odd times before, during, and after the reinstall. Since removing it, my system has not yet been revisited by the "freeze that knows no thaw." As pesky as that problem was, it turned out to be the least of my worries.

I started by reinstalling Red Hat 7.0 Professional. Every time I tried to run xscanimage in my previous install, I got an error message saying it could only be run as a plug-in for the GIMP. I thought I would avoid that problem the second time by specifically selecting the xsane-gimp package. I also thought usbview looked interesting, so I selected that too. Other than those two packages, the Red Hat 7.0 install was identical to the first. I'm still happy that I chose usbview; it was about the only thing connected to USB that seemed to work correctly.

I could see USB activity at boot time, even in the 2.2.16-22 kernel that Red Hat 7.0 is based upon. The UHCI (Universal Host Controller Interface) module loaded; soon after, a message appeared saying the USB filesystem was mounted.

Better yet, when I ran usbview, it neatly identified my HP Scanner and gave me a lot of specifics about its USB configuration. But none of

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