Using scanner with FreeBSD. A nightmare!

[Rob]

Hi,

I've been using FreeBSD for many years now;
usually sticking closely to the Stable updates.

I'm aware of some the do-it-yourself style with setting up
my routers, nameservers, webservers, printer servers etc.
All of this was reasonably well documented and meanwhile
I learned something about computing itself. All good reasons
to advertise FreeBSD as a 'fun' OS.

Not so with this scanner stuff.

I have an HP ScanJet 5200C; or better I claimed it in our
lab from one of my Windows collegues.

I've been struggling with sane, sane-find-scanner and its
family commands in the back/front-ends.

The problem is that I don't really know what I'm doing, so
my story hereafter may sound a bit chaotic.

All I get with sane-find-scanner is
   found USB scanner (UNKNOWN vendor and product) at device /dev/uscanner0

Somewhere in the docs it says that I have to tell my kernel about
the vendor and product.....in the kernel? Tried to find out how, couldn't.

Then it talks about libusb. Mentions vaguely /dev/ugen* somewhere, without
any useful details. Compiled ugen into the kernel, to no avail.

I am totally lost here.

And even worse: I'm about to bow deeply for my Windows collegue. What he
did within 5 minutes with this scanner, I couldn't in the last 3 days.

Is somebody willing to help me out here, before I give up completely?

A first help would be: how about this vendor & product stuff. How and where
do I unform the system? Which configuration file is needed for that?
I have modified /usr/local/etc/sane.d/hp.conf to:
    # HP ScanJet 5200C
    usb 0x03f0 0x0401
(rest I left commented out)
But that doesn't seem to do anything. Even putting rubbish in the hp.conf
file doesn't seem to affect the result of sane-find-scanner. So I concluded
that this hp.conf is the wrong configuration file for sane-find-scanner.

I have no idea where to continue. Please help!

Thanks so much!

Rob.