[Linux-aus] Quality of commercial hardware

[Jonathon Coombes]

On Fri, 2004-06-25 at 11:43, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> OK, I admit it, I gave in to the dark side.  A couple of months ago I
> decided that "SANE" stood for "Scanner Access Not Easy" and that I
> could accept using Microsoft to run a scanner, something like a tool
> rather than an operating system.  So I bought a Canon "CanoScan" 9900F
> scanner and tried to use it.
> 
> We'll skip over how incredibly painful it is to use Microsoft.
> Suffice it to say that I found out how to set up Samba and store the
> images directly on a real computer.  The real problem was in the
> software supplied with scanner itself: Canon don't believe in
> supplying product specs, and their own "driver" is so buggy that it's
> almost useless.

For SANE I would definately recommend the following:

1. Check with the SANE site for supported printers. I have found
   the Acer/Benq or Epson to be the best options (USB).

2. Make sure it is not a "new" chip design. Some of them are based
   around parallel or scsi emulations instead of proper USB.

3. Check the manufacturers website. More of them are at least
   listing if the devices work or not under Linux.

4. Keep the driver disks. Some scanners require one or more files
   from the driver disk to be used under Linux.

Regards
Jonathon