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Fixes for annoyances in Slackware
USB scanner and hotplug
When you have a USB scanner attached to your computer when it boots, and the computer uses hotplug to initialize your hardware, you will probably see something similar to the following message:
chown: cannot access `/proc/bus/usb/001/005': No such file or directory chmod: cannot access `/proc/bus/usb/001/005': No such file or directory
When you plug in your USB scanner after the computer has already booted up, the error does not appear and scanning works for non-root users. It is annoying to have to unplug the scanner before booting in order to be able to scan as a non-root user. Here's a fix.
The problem is due to an error in the /etc/hotplug/usb.rc script, but that can be repaired easily. Look for the following line in /etc/hotplug/usb.rc
devbus=$( ( echo -n 000 ; cat $devlink/../../devnum ) | grep -o ...\$ )
and change that line to
devbus=$( ( echo -n 000`echo $devlink| sed 's/^.*usb\([0-9]\+\)\/.*$/\1/'` ) | grep -o ...\$ )
After this change, either reboot the computer or restart hotplug:
/etc/rc.d/rc.hotplug restart
Now, the correct permissions and ownership are applied to the device file.
scanner group if you want to use your scanner as a non-root user! You can use the vigr command to add your name to the scanner group, but if you're uncomfortable with directly editing the system files, here is a one-liner to add user 'geek' to group 'scanner' (replace 'geek' with your own account name): usermod -G $(id -Gn geek | tr ' ' ','),scanner geek
If the group scanner does not exist, simply create it using the command
groupadd scanner
