Hi Davias,

Something about the xsane driver seems to put my scanner into an odd
state wherein I also get the "invalid argument" error message and cannot
scan.  At first I thought it could be a number of things (see comment
#30), but I've definitely nailed it down to hardware state issue.

Normally, the main LED indicating the scanner is powered on and ready is
either fully-lit green or off.  When the scanner gets in this odd state,
however, the LED is either off when the USB cable is unplugged or "half-
lit" green.  Switching USB ports, switching from one Ubuntu machine to
another -- nothing fixes it.  I've found that the only way to correct
the problem is to hook the scanner back up to a WinXP box and then run
some application that activates the manufacturer's driver (in my case,
the Epson Scan Utility).  I don't even have to scan anything -- I just
need to ensure that the main LED becomes fully-lit green again.

Eventually, under Ubuntu the scanner LED goes half-bright again and,
notably, thereafter the scanner *no longer* resets itself twice after
reboot (i.e., normally, I can hear the scanner resetting twice during
reboot -- this is true for when its connected to WinXP and it is true
when its connected to Ubuntu and when xsane will subsequently work).
I'm still not clear on when and why the scanner gets into this state,
but eventually I will and will then post here.

My scanner is an Epson, not a Brother, and I'm running 9.10, not 10.04,
so my problem and workaround may not be of help to you, but I'd be
curious one way or another.

My suspicion is that either xsane, some of its drivers, or some Ubuntu
USB driver put or leave the scanner hardware in some odd, non-functional
state.  The reason I say this is, not only does my scanner LED turn
half-lit green when the problem it starts, it *stays* that way no matter
what: hard reboot of the machine, removing power from the scanner, doing
both at the same time, doing both in the two possible orderings, etc.
Nada, nothing, nichts.  The *only* way I have found to "reset" the
scanner is to have the manufacturer's drivers interact with it.  Very
odd indeed.

Next time this happens, I'm going to try running the Epson Scan Utility
on WinXP under VirtualBox on the Ubuntu machine to which my scanner is
normally connecting.  I don't know if it will work or not, but it'd be
nice to be to fix this problem on the fly w/o having to reboot or
physically move the scan.

Anyway, my apologies for the long post.  I hope this information can be
of help to you or others.

Cheers,
Doug

-- 
failed to start scanner: Invalid argument
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/478761
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