Image Scanning 101

[dejamuse]

How to setup a scanner

The weak underbelly of PCBSD is unfortunately a lack of decent hardware support, though the situation is constantly improving. Every piece of hardware seems to have its own support group external to FreeBSD. Some cover Linux as well. The group for image scanners is called SANE, or Scanner Access Now Easy.

SANE maintains a list of compatible scanners and also produces a backend that auto-recognizes your scanner when you plug it in, which is pre-installed with PCBSD. The problem is, that nearly all of the currently available modern scanners are not supported. I could only find one that you can still buy that was, and none of the supported scanners are of the super high resolution variety (4800 DPI).

So, I ended up buying a Canon CanoScan LiDE 25 from Buy.com, for $50. It's a really basic USB scanner (self powered) and just basically works, though it's not the speediest I've ever seen. It's not one of the newer models, so it's not clear just for how long it will still be available. I bought mine in October, 2008.

Auto recognition for scanners does not work in PCBSD 1.5.1 because of a file permission bug that was just fixed for PCBSD 7. You can get around this problem in V1.5 by rebooting the system with the scanner plugged in. If you then disconnect the scanner and plug it back in, it won't be recognized. The other alternative is to run the scanning utility as root, which is of course, dangerous.

I tried the default scanning utility that comes with PCBSD 7, Skanlite, and hated it. The colors were way off and the interface sucked. The utility that shipped with PCBSD 1.5, Kooka, is arguably better. Even better yet, IMHO, is Xsane. If you have PCBSD 7 and want Kooka, it's just a heartbeat away. I had dependency issues with installing Kooka as a package, so I did it from ports (as root):

cd /usr/ports/graphics/kooka && make install distclean

Xsane, however can be installed as a package:

pkg_add -r xsane

Installing xsane may not put itself in the KDE menu, so you may have to manually add it (but check to see if it did first). The executable path is: /usr/local/bin/xsane

You can see if your (plugged-in) scanner is detected by typing:

scanimage  -L

The SANE project is here:
Here's the list of supported scanners.
SANE has a search engine to see if your scanner is supported:

This article helped me - but it is not necessary to patch the kernel (they were using FreeBSD 4.8 ) nor is it necessary to change the scanner config file, in my case /usr/local/etc/sane.d/plustek.conf

Xsane is also available as a GIMP plug-in. It isn't listed in the Gimp plug-in registry, but here's how to do it:

UPDATE: When I first installed Xsane as a package it included Gimp support, but I've found recently when reinstalling to my new 7.1 system that it wasn't included, so it will be necessary to build Xsane with Gimp support, from ports. Hopefully this will all be put into a PBI someday.

Create a symbolic link to the Xsane executable, as user (not root):

ln -s /usr/local/bin/xsane ~/.gimp-2.6/plug-ins/

Obviously this is for Gimp 2.6. Change the directory to your installed version accordingly.

Flush the Gimp available device cache (as root):

touch /usr/local/bin/xsane

or delete this file:

/home/your_user_name/.gimp-2.6/pluginrc

This file will be regenerated by Gimp when it starts up to include the new Xsane plug-in.

More info in the man pages: /usr/local/man/man1/xsane.1.gz

Now you can scan images directly into Gimp through the file-->create-->xsane device dialog...