Another new delight in Fedora Core 1 is the libusb library. I wasn’t aware of this until I upgraded to VueScan 7.6.78, which can now use libusb instead of the normal USB scanner driver. In fact, the driver no longer worked, but since it’s going away with the 2.6 kernel, this seemed a good opportunity to switch to libusb. The linked instructions were mostly sufficient to get it working with my Canon flatbed scanner. One tip: if you’re using a 2.4 kernel, you need to rename or otherwise disable the scanner.o module (under /lib/modules/) to stop it conflicting with libusb. Update: VueScan 7.6.80 appears to have fixed this issue.

…It’s frightening how much that previous paragraph resembles typical MS-DOS advice from fifteen years ago. Progress, eh?