Peter Alcibiades wrote:
Does this sound familiar at all?
On a squeeze installation, there is a usb scanner. Works just fine. But for unclear reasons every now and then, it may be because someone plugs in another computer to the usb hub to print, not quite sure, when xsane starts up it gives the usual message about not being able to start the scanner.
I fix this by brute force, I start up a demo copy of vuescan, after which all is well again. But I have no idea why this should work.
I have seen similar things before (although not for a while) where different (or windows) drivers can put hardware into a "funny" state that the linux drivers cannot cope with. Maybe vuescan and the sane version that ships with mandriva can cope with this but whatever ships with debian can't.
It used to happen to me in the old days when I dual booted and (iirc) my soundcard. To go from windows to linux I had to powercycle the machine, a warm boot wouldn't cut it because the windows drivers did something to the state of the card.
Did you get to see what happened if you powercycled the MFP (not just a soft power off) ?