[Techtalk] "I need to use Windows because ..."

[Akkana]

Suzi Anvin writes:
> Now - to find scanner software.  OCR would be a nice plus, but not a 
> need - it never worked well enough for me to depend on it in Winblows 
> anyhow.  

I use xsane; on redhat I install packages sane-frontends, sane-backends,
xsane, xsane-gimp, and sane-backends-devel (just in case I ever find
time to try writing a sane backend for one of the new cheap slide
scanners, but I wish someone else would beat me to it!)  

sane-frontends comes with xscanimage, but I find that xsane works
better for me (and xsane-gimp puts it under an Import... menu in gimp).

Not every scanner has a sane backend available, though, so you do
have to do some homework first.  (Parallel scanners are generally
not supported, because they use undocumented proprietary protocols.) 
I got a USB Microtek 3600, for about $40; the driver was listed as
experimental, and I had to find instructions for how to set up hotplug
to handle it, but it works pretty well for me -- a few glitches now
and then, but my old Umax had some glitches under Windows too, plus
the Umax driver horked my windows system and I had to reinstall two or
three times -- I've had far fewer problems with linux and xsane.

	...Akkana