Fixing your scanner on Debian Buster

If your scanner worked on Debian 9 but refuses to work on Debian 10, like my Canon LiDE 210, you can google, read forums and bug reports forever, but you stand almost no chance of figuring it out. I did get it to work finally this morning, but I still don’t know how exactly it dawned on me where to look for the culprit.

The culprit is scanbd that is supposed to detect button presses on scanners and run convenience scripts. It doesn’t work, and it blocks sane from accessing the scanner properly.

1
2

$ sudo systemctl stop scanbd.service
$ sudo systemctl disable scanbd.service

That’s all you need.