Progress

My scanner is attached to the dual-boot XP/Debian box, and up till now I’ve done all of my scanning under Windows. I was curious if I could get it to work under Linux too though, to avoid having to reboot just to scan something.

I had no idea what was necessary to get it working in Linux though. I vaguely remember there being a device driver for this model mentioned on some USB compatibility list, and I remembered something called SANE that had to do with scanning, though I couldn’t remember if it was a program or library or what, and I hadn’t the foggiest idea if there were any kind of GUI frontends that would make using it easier or what they’d be called. Normally you have to get a half-dozen prerequisites installed and configured correctly before something new like this will work.

So, I figured I’d work backwards, find the program I’d mainly use, figure out its prerequisites, get them, find and fulfill their prerequisites, and so on. Since I was already in a KDE session, I browsed through the menus looking for something useful, and quickly found the ‘Kooka’ Scan/OCR program under the graphics menu. I launched it to see what it would complain about, and it presented me with a prompt to select which device to scan with, with the Epson model I have already pre-selected. After confirming that, I got a window similar to the Windows scanner software, with a number of option and buttons. I hit the Preview Scan button, and lo and behold, a scanned image of the reference card I had on the scanner showed up.

Well, that was a bit easier than expected. It’s a pleasant surprise when something Just Works when you’re normally used to having to install and tweak complex configurations manually. If the usability of Linux distros keeps improving like this, that desktop market might not be so far out of reach after all…