Scanner recommendations

[luggw1]

I am in need of a new flatbed scanner. I currently have a Microtek V6USL hooked up as a USB that is giving me nothing but trouble in both Linux and Windows with hanging in the middle of scanning and Microtek has been absolutely worthless at providing help.

I've been going through the SANE compatibility charts, but trying to find a cross between something with full support in the charts and that is available at someplace like New Egg is like getting dental work done without novocaine.

So, I thought I ask what others' experiences are. I don't want to spend a whole lot of money, somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 to $150 for it. I don't need any fancy stuff, like a sheet feeder - I just want to be able to get a good scan of photos and documents. I also want something that isn't going to be difficult to get working under Linux.

All thoughts and opinions would be greatly appreciated.

Bill Lugg

[techieMoe]

I have a Canon CanoScan LiDE60 USB flatbed scanner that I picked up for around $60USD if I remember correctly. It didn't always work until recently when a new version of the SANE library was released. It has worked fine with the latest batch of Linuxes I tested.

[dth1]

Strange but I have the same scanner as technieMoe. It works fine with 10.2 (and with 10.0 when I used it).

[luggw1]

Well, on your recommendations I took the plunge and bought one of these little beasties. It makes my old scanner look mamoth in comparison.

So, I shut down the machine and plugged it in. I fired it back up and figured that YaST was the place to configure it. It does see the scanner and recognizes that it is a Canon device, but when I get into the list to select a driver, only the LiDE 20 and 30 are offered using a plustek driver. The SANE web site claims that the genesys driver should be used for this scanner, but that's not offered in YaST.

I also tried scanimage -L as su which told me there are no scanners and sane-find-scanner which told me there there is a canon USB scanner attached, but nothing else.

So, at this point, I'm a little lost. What do I need to do to get the scanner working under SuSE 10.0? Do I need to update SANE to 10.0.18 from 10.0.15 (where it is now)? If so, where do I need to point my browser to get the SuSE rpms as I seem to be having some trouble finding my way around the new OpenSuSE website? FWIW, I'm running on an X86_64 box.

Thanks in advance for the help.

Bill Lugg

[techieMoe]

Well, to the best of my knowledge SuSE (even the latest version, 10.2) still doesn't have an up-to-date version of the SANE library, so you're not going to be able to get it to work without some tweaking. I'm interested to see how dth1 got his working, though.

[luggw1]

Reading your earlier response, I presume you downloaded sane from the sane project web site and configured it outside any OS supplied tools?

Bill

[luggw1]

Well, I poked around at this a bit more and found a SuSE rpm at PakMan.links2linux.com for the sane 10.0.18 backends. I went ahead and installed them and went back to the scanner configuration screen. I now find the LiDE 60 listed with the genesys driver as expected. However, when I click Next, it comes back with a message box that says "Error: Failed to activate genesys." I click OK and it appears that I'm done. No clues as to why or what to do to get this thing to work.

Any thoughts?

Thanks.
Bill