Comment 4 for bug 455889

I actually experienced Bug #478761 today, but I saw this when I googled and thought it might be somewhat related. This is my post for that bug...

I was having a similar problem with XSane today. According to Oliver Rauch, the author of XSane, the SANE team has changed some things in the latest release of the backends that breaks compatibility. This was posted on the XSane web site in February...

"If you experience any problems with XSane and sane-backends with a version number greater than 1.0.19 then this may be caused by an incompatible development of sane-backends. In this case it may be worth to try sane-backends-1.0.19 or earlier. XSane is and will keep compatible to the original SANE-1.0 standard. I will not spend any time for incompatible things that will mess up everything."

Indeed if you look at the version numbers in Jaunty libsane is 1.0.19, whereas the one in Karmic is 1.0.20, so I suppose this kind of makes sense.

I went into Synaptic and removed xsane and its dependencies, then installed older versions from source. Now things seem to be working again with my Canon scanner. (I can scan but my preview window is a bit messed up... probably unrelated though.)

Download from:
    http://www.sane-project.org/source.html
    http://www.xsane.org/xsane-download.html

Hope that helps you guys too!