I recently acquired a vintage (2006?) Minolta Elite 5400 II scanner, and – according to the VueScan support info, I needed to ”set up libusb device protections”..   That info included a link to a somewhat ancient SANE USB support page – last changed in 2003!..

That rang a bell, and I guessed that I had to mess about with good old UDEV again, after many years..

Sure enough, the scanner showed up ok:

# lsusb |grep Minolta
Bus 001 Device 019: ID 132b:0012 Konica Minolta Dimage Scan Elite 5400 II (2892)

– but would only work if I ran the scanner utility as ‘root’…

I had some notes on making an Epson scanner work, from 2008, but that was somewhat out-of-date – mentioning the use of good old usbfs etc etc..

As usual, there is a lot of searchable information on this topic, but much of it is tragically out-of-date – and some is just inaccurate speculation..

The solution is actually fairly simple, these days..

On my Fedora 23 system, I just had to add a ‘.rules’ file under the /etc/udev/rules.d directory (not the one at /lib/udev/rules.d!)

I created a text file ‘50-scanner.rules‘ with the following contents, including the vendor and product ids from the # lsusb output:

# Minolta Dimage 5400 II (added Feb 2016. RG)
ATTRS{idVendor}=="132b", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0012", ENV{libsane_matched}="yes", GROUP="users", MODE="0660"

To save time, I just added myself to the ‘users‘ group.. You could create a new ‘scanners‘ group and add yourself to it, and change the GROUP= parameter accordingly…

Just power-cycle the scanner, and everything should work correctly..      Scan output quality is excellent…   Shame they stopped production some years back…

Robert Gadsdon.   February 19, 2016.