Permission Denied when scanning in Linux Mint

Posted: 2015-10-05 20:28:03 by Alasdair Keyes

Direct Link | RSS feed


I bought a Brother DCP-L2500D Printer/scanner yesterday. After some trepidation as to whether I would be able to use it under Linux, a quick Google search showed that Brother provided drivers for Windows, Mac and Linux. Kudos Brother, it's nice to see companies supporting all their customers not just the high volume users.

After installation of the Drivers into Linux Mint, I could print but not scan. Every time I tried I received the following error.

When trying to scan with XSane I would get

Failed to open device `brother4:bus1:dev1': Invalid argument

And under Simple Scan I would get

Failed to scan - Unable to connect to scanner

As I could print, I assumed the device was correct, so the failure to open device error indicated a permissions issue.

Although CUPS doesn't make use of the traditional device /dev/usb/lp0 (but instead uses a separate identifier usb://Brother/DCP-L2500D%20series?serial=XXXXXXXXXXXXXX), looking at this device showed that it was owned by the lp group

ls -al /dev/usb/lp0 
crw-rw---- 1 root lp 180, 0 Oct  5 20:13 /dev/usb/lp0

Although I was a member of the lpadmin group, I wasn't part of lp

$ id alasdair
uid=1000(alasdair) gid=1000(alasdair) groups=1000(alasdair),4(adm),24(cdrom),27(sudo),30(dip),46(plugdev),108(lpadmin),110(sambashare)

A quick change to my group ownership, then logging out and back in sorted it out and allowed me to scan.

$ sudo usermod -Ga lp alasdair
$ id alasdair
uid=1000(alasdair) gid=1000(alasdair) groups=1000(alasdair),4(adm),7(lp),24(cdrom),27(sudo),30(dip),46(plugdev),108(lpadmin),110(sambashare)

If you get this issue, remember to logout/login before trying to scan again, it's key as a usermod won't take effect until you do.


If you found this useful, please feel free to donate via bitcoin to 1NT2ErDzLDBPB8CDLk6j1qUdT6FmxkMmNz

© Alasdair Keyes

IT Consultancy Services

I'm now available for IT consultancy and software development services - Cloudee LTD.



Happy user of Digital Ocean (Affiliate link)


Version:master-604d31a82e


Validate HTML 5