xsane can't see my scanner unless I'm root

[Paul Smith]

On Thu, 2012-07-26 at 07:00 -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> All well and good, except where the hell is the button to start entering a 
> new bug?  This is the same situation I was in the last time I waded through 
> the launchpad login process quite some time back, and of course I'd 
> forgotten that password, so I had to screw around 10 minutes changing it 
> before I could log in.  I didn't enter a report the last time either.

I won't say Launchpad is easy or a good interface.  The thing that
really frustrates me about it is that there are so many entries for any
given package, and only one of them is the one you want... but it's very
hard to know (without prior information) which one it is.  And the one
you DON'T want is the most obvious one, that everyone will probably
assume is the right one.

Here's how I do it:

Go to the main Launchpad page.  There is a prominent search box.  I
enter the name of the package for which I want to report a bug (I know
this is also problematic, because often you don't know the name of the
package).  For example I typed "xsane" here.

Now you get a list of all sorts of packages, releases, etc. with the
name "xsane".  This is the tricky part.  The one you want is usually
named something like "<pkg> package in Ubuntu".  Click on that.

Note the one you do NOT want is the "<pkg> in Launchpad" element.  This
is some kind of tracking item for the upstream release (as I understand
it) and so you can't report bugs against it.  And of course I can't find
any way to jump from the upstream release item to the individual Ubuntu
items.  It's all very confusing.  Don't click that link.

Once you get to the main Ubuntu package management page for that
package, on the right under the heading "Get Involved" will be a link
"Report a Bug".  I think it's pretty straightforward after that.


There are probably seven other ways to do it, with at least 4 simpler
than this.  But, it works for me.