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Author Topic: USB Barcode Scanner trouble  (Read 3555 times)

Offline med-men

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USB Barcode Scanner trouble
« on: September 10, 2009, 05:42:23 AM »
Hi,

first of all, sorry if this post is misplaced here, I just didnt find any other place that fits..
Now the question:
I have a usb-barcode-scanner i use for a web application. Since the whole project is running on an old PII-400 Laptop (IBM Thinkpad 600) and Debian takes up to 4 minutes to boot on it due to some error on boot-time i was yet unable to track down, i tried with a frugal tinycore install (tc 2.2).
Booting time is awesome and getting xampp to run in it was no problem, but the barcode-scanner somehow won't work. It seems to be recognized from what i can see, even lights up and beeps one time when i press the scan-button, but then freezes up without anything scanned..
I installed every tce regarding usb i could find - nothing..
The scanner works flawlessly with Debian..

Any hints where to start searching or anything i can do to get at least some debugging output? I cant even find a logfile telling me something..

As I am new to tc, any help/hint is greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance,

med-men

Offline Juanito

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Re: USB Barcode Scanner trouble
« Reply #1 on: September 10, 2009, 05:57:18 AM »
Have you installed the usb-utils extension? If so, what does "lsusb" report?

Offline med-men

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Re: USB Barcode Scanner trouble
« Reply #2 on: September 10, 2009, 07:21:36 AM »
usb-utils and usb-serial are installed (dont know if latter is necessary)

lsusb gives:
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 1130:0001 Tenx Technology, Inc.

so as far as i see, the scanner is recognized in second line... what now?
Thanx

Offline Juanito

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Re: USB Barcode Scanner trouble
« Reply #3 on: September 10, 2009, 07:32:24 AM »
I don't think usb-serial is required and it looks like your scanner is recognised for what it is.

Wouldn't you need some kind of application to drive the scanner or is that provided by the web interface? Does the web interface depend or perl, python or similar?

Does "dmesg | tail -25" show anything interesting?

Offline med-men

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Re: USB Barcode Scanner trouble
« Reply #4 on: September 10, 2009, 07:58:04 AM »
Just checked the Linux-USB-Database and it says the scanner works without any additional drivers.
The Web-Application is just a bunch of PHP-scripts, in debian no additional driver/converter or interpreter is used..
the barcode scanner just acts as "another keyboard", inserting the translated barcode in the highlighted form-field..
which gives me an idea: is tc eventually limited to 1 keyboard-dev or something like that? in that case i would probably have to add some extra device-file and attach it to the usb-scanner somehow (sorry if i talk nonsense, my knowledge of how /dev /udev and friends really work is basically non existant..)

any comments, hints, ideas?

Offline curaga

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Re: USB Barcode Scanner trouble
« Reply #5 on: September 11, 2009, 02:33:45 PM »
Take a look at Debian's dmesg and see what it says about the reader; then see what TC's dmesg does.
The only barriers that can stop you are the ones you create yourself.