Sorry that this is a bit of a long posting, but I want to explain what I've been doing to get a couple of USB devices working for me, and question why my Epson Perfection 2450 Photo scanner behaves in an inconsistent fashion when I connect it to USB. Until a couple of weeks ago when I built a new PC, I was still using RH9. I had problems with using USB on RH9, mounting flash memory devices, and I gave up using the printer with USB. But my USB scanner always worked every time. Now that I'm using FC3, it's obvious that a hell of a lot of hard work has gone into fixing USB, for which I am very grateful to the developer(s). I can now reliably use my flash memory devices (the ByteStor branded ones that Amazon sells). When I plug one in I always get a device of the same name (/dev/sdb1) and mountpoint (/media/USBDISKPRO) so I just right clicked the desktop and selected Create New Device, then selected the device from the drop down list and set the nice USB memory device icon. Now I can plug in the device, right click on the desktop icon, mount, and it's working. Same with USB->serial adaptors. I tried one out with my Garmin GPS12. Had to set the permissions for the device that was created, then put /dev/ttyUSB0 into the options of GPSMan, and it "just worked". So again, well done to the developers. Great job. But what has happened to scanners? I just can't get it to work reliably. On RH9 all I had to do was uncomment a line in epson.conf to get it working. When I now switch on my scanner, a device which I think is a symbolic link, called scanner-usb-:proc:bus:usb:001:002 pops up in /dev/, which says it points to /proc/bus/usb/001/002. Which would probably be fine except that when I cycle the power on the scanner, it now pops up in /dev/ with a different name, this time it's called scanner-usb-:proc:bus:usb:001:003 and points to /proc/bus/usb/001/003. I found a how-to about getting Epson scanners working with FC3 http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-26744.html but hey, surely this is way too complicated to expect your average person who doesn't know a lot about computers to get it working? I write software for a living, and I don't understand what's going on. Why does the scanner keep appearing as different names in /dev/? If it had the same name each time, could the name not simply be edited into /etc/sane.d/epson.conf or /etc/sane.d/epkowa.conf? Any chance of making it work like this in future updates? Thanks for taking time to read all this. Dave Fletcher
