[ Thanks to jhansonxi for this link.
]
“SCSI scanners pretty much ruled in the days before USB
as they were much faster than parallel ports. However, they were a
pain to configure and required heavy (and usually short) cables
which made them difficult to fit into your work area. I tested a
Microtek ScanMaker E3 (MRS-600E3) and UMAX Vista S8 scanner first.
They worked without problems although the former was picky about
termination. Unfortunately a Hewlett-Packard ScanJet 6100C (Q2950A)
didn’t work at all.“Checking the kernel messages indicated that it was represented
by /dev/sg7 but the permissions were 0660 root:root so sane
couldn’t access it. Changing the permissions solved the problem but
the /dev directory is a virtual filesystem controlled by udev and
the changes are lost after reboot. I could just put a chmod comand
in /etc/rc.local but that is the wrong way to fix it. A search on
launchpad found bug #378989 which describes the problem with this
model. I’m not sure if the fault lies with udev or HAL but creating
a udev rule is a simple enough way to fix it for now. I’ll describe
how to create such a rule using this as an example but udev rules
can do much more than just change device permissions.”