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The Scanner HOWTO

Howard Shane

Revision History
Revision 1.12004-05-16Revised by: jhs
Libusb and kernel 2.6-series updates, clarifications
Revision 1.052004-01-15Revised by: jhs
Miscellaneous errata and updates
Revision 1.02003-08-19Revised by: tm
Initial release, reviewed by LDP
Revision 0.0407-03Revised by: jhs
Clarified, revised and edited after inviting feedback from participants of the SANE-devel mailing list
Revision 0.0106-03Revised by: jhs
Completed draft.

This document was written to document the steps necessary for access and use of a photographic scanner device on a system running Linux.


Table of Contents
1. Introduction
1.1. Copyright Information
1.2. Disclaimer
1.3. New Versions
1.4. Credits
1.5. Feedback
1.6. Conventions Used in this Document
2. General Support and Interface Type
2.1. SCSI Scanners
2.2. USB Scanners
2.3. Parallel Port Scanners
2.4. IEEE 1394 (Firewire™, i.Link™)
2.5. Operating System Support
2.6. USB Scanners and Libusb
2.7. Linux Kernel Support of your Scanner Device
2.8. Parallel Port Scanners
3. Making and Accessing the Scanner Devices
3.1. Device Filesystem and Udev
3.2. Creating Devices Manually
3.3. Groups and Permissions
4. SANE
4.1. Getting SANE
4.2. Configuring SANE
5. Testing Your Scanner
6. SANE Frontends
7. Troubleshooting
7.1. Help, my scanner cannot be found by scanimage or xsane!
7.2. Help, I'm not sure my USB hardware is working!
7.3. Help, scanimage or the frontend I am using identifies the wrong device!
7.4. Help, I can only access my parallel-port scanner as root!
7.5. Help, I have an Acme Whizzbang™ or other model scanner and you haven't addressed my particular problem!
8. Gnu Free Documentation License