I had the same issue on a fresh install of 16.04, after installing the brother drivers with their automatic script.
I ran an strace of simple-scan, as recommended by Kuwanger in the IRC, and found that simple-scan didn't have permission to access some cache files. The problem was that simple-scan's cache files were owned by root, and not accessible by the user. The solution was to run sudo chown -R <yourusername> ~/.cache/simple-scan Of course, replace <yourusername> with the name of your user. I hope that helps! -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to simple-scan in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1376300 Title: Scanning works only as root after upgrade to 14.04 LTS, fixable by adding user to group lp Status in simple-scan package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Bug description: I have a Brother MFC-7420 printer/scanner combination device. It was working when I had Ubuntu 12.04 LTS installed. I have installed the Brother drivers from the Brother website (brscan2 version 0.2.5-1). When upgrading to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS scanning stopped working as a normal user, neither Simple Scan nor Xsane found the scanner. When launching as root, both were working (e.g. sudo simple-scan). The problem was related to the scanner device (/dev/usb/lp0) belonging to the group lp, with normal users having no access permissions to the device file. When I added my user account to the lp group, it solved the issue. Curiously, sane-find-scanner still cannot find my scanner, but scanimage -L works, as well as simple-scan and xsane. The same problem has been discussed here, concerning Ubuntu 13.10 (I'm running 14.04 LTS 64bit): http://ubuntu.5.x6.nabble.com/xsane-and-simple-scan-only-working-as-root-td5044224.html To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/simple-scan/+bug/1376300/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
