On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 01:06:22AM +0000, Peter Alcibiades wrote: [snip long tale of woe about USB scanner]
But, what on earth could be going on?
In my experience it's just par for the course when using USB. Many of my current issues and problems with computers seem to be with USB devices. Often it's trying to get VirtualBox to handle a USB device and other such things. I've also found that a USB to ethernet adapter just fails to work completely in Linux.
USB is inevitably complex because there are so many possible 'things' that can be plugged in. Mass storage devices are handled pretty well because they're so common but the moment you move away into other sorts of devices things become less certain.
Lots of the issues on the linux-usb list were down to devices which didn't follow the rules but had bodged windows drivers so that they work successfully with MS-Windows. The changes and patches to the Linux USB drivers were adding code to work around these bodges for each specific device.