Usb

This will probably be a lot about usb sticks.

linux on usb stick

Newer usb sticks are larger and may be rewritten a lot more than older ones. A real OS could nowadays be put on them.

See this page for a description of this. Here is a terse version of that.

Try and find the drives with a command like this :

dmesg | grep scsi -A 3

It gave /dev/sdi in my case, so i will use that. You will need an image to write to it, and live is the best choice of course. Get it , for instance, here : visit

Put it on the stick with :

dd if=debian-live-7.5.0-amd64-gnome-desktop.iso of=/dev/sdi bs=4M; sync

scanner problem

For a network setup use the brsaneconfig4 tool. See network page.

Starting xsane on debian as a non-root user fails with this message :

Failed to open device 'brother4:bus9:dev1' invalid argument.

Starting xsane by hand as root user works fine so this must be a rights issue. A quick workaround is to find the usb port you need with lsusb. Most interesting entry was :

Bus 001 Device 005: ID 04f9:0340 Brother Industries, Ltd 

So .. bus 1, device 5. Now we need to alter device rights to let use kees scan :

sudo chmod a+w /dev/bus/001/005

Now this does work for this session but a reboot will wipe it all away. Now if we do a ls -l of the device in question :

ls -l /dev/bus/usb/001

crw-rw-r-- 1 root root 189, 256 Oct  9 19:18 001
crw-rw-r-- 1 root root 189, 257 Oct  9 19:18 002
crw-rw-r-- 1 root lp   189, 260 Oct  9 19:18 005

Ok, so it belongs to group lp (lineprinter ?). Any way it makes sense to add all users to that group. So we edit /etc/group and add kees and yvon to group lp:

lp