Last night I was in emergency need of a scanner and my old one (which never worked in Linux) died quite completely. I was trying to use it with vmware and windows XP, but even plugging in the usb cord caused vmplayer to freeze completely. So I decided I had a few minutes to maybe run down to crapusa and grab a cheapo scanner that might have a chance of working with Linux. I noticed that the Epson all-in-one unites were often cheaper than the standalone flatbed scanners and I remembered hearing that epson all-in-one's worked well with Linux. So after verifying this on the web, I went down and picked up an Epson CX3810. It almost but not quite worked out of the box. The printer side of it worked straight away of course (gimp-print is marvelous). The scanner side required two configs. I had to put the vendor id and product id (which I found on google!) into the sane configuration file and then I had to edit the hotplug file /etc/hotplug/usb/libsane.usermap to make sure it had a line with the vendor and product ids so that the /dev entry would be set up properly. Then it just worked.
xsane is actually very well-designed. It certainly has a better UI than the clunky crap HP cranks out. If you use a number at the end of the file name, it will automatically increment that number allowing rapid page scans that you can then join with imagemagick into a pdf or something. Quite efficient. The real cool feature, though, is that you can run sane in server mode and then use xsane to scan from anywhere on the network. Took about 2 minutes to configure and now my other machine is happily scanning as if the scanner was plugged into it. Very cool. Xsane frontends are available for *nix, OSX, and Windows, so that all can scan. How cool is that. Anyway, thought I'd pass on the info for those that might be looking for a good linux scanner or an all-in-one unit that works in Linux (and probably BSD too). Michael -------------------- BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
