Canon CanoScan LIDE 25 and MacOS X 10.5, intermediate victory

Submitted by konrad on Fri, 2009-09-11 21:45
in

I'm owner of a Canon CanoScan LIDE 25 flat-bed scanner, and from the day I upgraded to Leopard until today, I couldn't scan under MacOS 10.5.

Canon provides two pieces of software: the CanoScan Toolbox (an ugly box full of 1990s-style buttons) and the ScanGear backend which does the actual work. Whenever I installed the software on my 10.5 system, the CanoScan Toolbox installer reported success and left an ugly program in my Applications folder. The ScanGear installer also reported success. However, CanoScan Toolbox claimed to be unable to find a scanner, and Image Capture.app found no TWAIN driver.
It worked under 10.4.

Today, I discovered that the ScanGear installation archive contains many more files than were installed. For example, the directory /Library/Image Capture/TWAIN Data Sources/CanoScan LiDE 25.ds/, while being mentioned in the BOM file Scan Gear CS 11.0 Eng_Installer.pkg/Contents/Archive.bom, was nowhere to be found. I had read suggestions in forum postings about Leopard's "This file is from the internet, run it anyway?" mechanism being involved, so I installed the package from the command line:


sudo installer -verbose -pkg /Volumes/lide25osx11030en/ScanGear\ CS\ 11.0\ Eng_Installer.pkg/ -target / -lang en

And one reboot later, it worked. I got to read the man pages for lsbom, installer and pkgutil on the way.

I hope this blog post qualifies for "most delayed Leopard upgrade story". All the time, I worked around the problem by scanning from inside my Linux VirtualBox VM, where I spend a lot of time anyway. SANE from MacPorts somehow claimed to not find my scanner (sane-find-scanner found it, but scanimage didn't).