Vuescan and Nikon LS-40

[Matthias Julius <lists@julius-net.net>]

Hi all,

I used to use Vuescan 8.2.11 from Ed Hamrick <http://www.hamrick.com>
together with my Nikon LS-40 (USB) to scan my photos. Unfortunately is
a 32 bit binary only software.  I had Vuescan installed under
/usr/local/vuescan and the required libs via chroot according to the
HOWTO.

This worked happyly until the last time I used it sometime in April or
so.  The recent Debian kernel at this point probably was 2.6.8.

Now, the other day I wanted to use my scanner again and Vuescan did
not find the it.  So I first updated Vuescan to the latest version at
this time 8.2.26.  Sometime in between 8.2.11 and 8.2.26 Ed Hamrick
switched from GTK to GTK2.  I did not find an easy way to configure 32
bit pango so I installed Vuescan inside the chroot and run it in
there.

Vuescan is now running but despite all the effort it still does not
find the scanner.  64 bit XSane is working so it does not seam to be a
hardware problem.  However, 32 bit XSane inside the chroot does not see
the scanner neither.  In the hope to get a clue I run both XSane and
Vuescan with strace.  In its output with XSane i found:

open("/proc/bus/usb/002/017", O_RDWR)   = 6
ioctl(6, USBDEVFS_IOCTL, 0xffffb350)    = -1 EINVAL (Invalid argument)
close(6)                                = 0

That certainly does not look good.  With Vuescan strace showed
something similar.  I guess it is some 32/64 bit type error.

Since it worked with an earlier kernel: Has there something changed
since kernel 2.6.8?

I have mounted usbfs inside the chroot.  Is there a problem with that?

It should not be the cause since Vuescan 8.2.11 does not see the
scanner outside the chroot neither.

Has anyone a clue what I could do to get closer to my goal?

Matthias