sane - Scanner Access Now Easy

• ** Work in progress - not yet ready for use ***

Introduction

sane (Scanner Access Now Easy) is the linux way of scanning. sane supports a great many scanners, and the community around sane adds support for more scanners all the time. By and large, most supported scanners are plug and play simple (plug them in and your ready to scan). However, some scanners

About this tutorial

This tutorial will walk you through the basic set up of sane with plug and play scanners.

== Assumptions == We make the following assumptions in this tutorial (you will need to adjust these to fit your situation)

• This set up assumes that we are on a small home or office network and are behind a firewall.
• Our LAN is an IP4 network on subnet 192.168.0.0/24 (192.168.0.0 - 192.168.0.255)
• Our Ubuntu box is 192.168.0.23
• Our USB scanner is located at libusb:001:003
• Our SCSI scanner is at /dev/sg1
• Our network scanner is at 192.168.0.15

Setting up SANE

Step 1: Installing sane

Ensure that you have at least version 1.0.22 of sane installed. sane 1.0.22 is installed by default on ubuntu 11.10 desktops, but we still need to check and make sure we have it, and that we have the correct version. To do that, run this command from a terminal:

scanimage -V

You should see something like this as a result:

scanimage (sane-backends) 1.0.22; backend version 1.0.22

(hint: it should already be installed on Ubuntu 11.10 and higher. If it reads version 1.0.21, you do not have the magicolor back end, and need to upgrade to a newer version of ubuntu).

If sane is not installed (you would have gotten a command not found error), then you can install it using the following command

This will also install the xsane front end. Note that some scanner will require other packages be installed. Those are covered in the scanner specific pages.

Installing your USB scanner

USB scanners are mostly auto detected.

1. With your scanner plugged into your computer via a USB cable, run the command:

sane-find-scanner

the output of that command will look something like this:

  # sane-find-scanner will now attempt to detect your scanner. If the
  # result is different from what you expected, first make sure your
  # scanner is powered up and properly connected to your computer.

  # No SCSI scanners found. If you expected something different, make sure that
  # you have loaded a kernel SCSI driver for your SCSI adapter.

found USB scanner (vendor=0x132b [KONICA MINOLTA], product=0x2089 [KONICA MINOLTA magicolor 1690MF scan]) at libusb:001:003

  # Your USB scanner was (probably) detected. It may or may not be supported by
  # SANE. Try scanimage -L and read the backend's manpage.

  # Not checking for parallel port scanners.

  # Most Scanners connected to the parallel port or other proprietary ports
  # can't be detected by this program.

You can ignore everything that starts with a hash tag, but the important part is this line:

found USB scanner (vendor=0x132b [KONICA MINOLTA], product=0x2089 [KONICA MINOLTA magicolor 1690MF scan]) at libusb:001:003

2. We need to add those two values to the Magicolor back end. To do that, fire up gedit as root using this command:

• sudo gedit /etc/sane.d/magicolor.conf

3. Find the line that reads:

• usb

and after it we need to add a line with the word "usb" followed by the vendor number and the product number we got with the scanimage -L command. That line should look like this:

• usb 0x132b 0x2089

4. After you have added that line, save the file and close gedit.

== Installing your