Книга: Fedora™ Unleashed, 2008 edition

Using Scanners in Fedora

Using Scanners in Fedora

With the rise of digital photography, there has been an equal decline in the need for image scanners. However, there are still times that you want to use a scanner, and Fedora makes it easy.

You can also use many types of image scanners with The GIMP. In the past, the most capable scanners required a SCSI port. Today, however, most scanners work through a USB port. You must have scanner support enabled for Linux (usually through a loaded kernel module, scanner.o) before using a scanner with The GIMP.

Although some scanners can work via the command line, you will enjoy more productive scanning sessions if you use a graphical interface because GUI features, such as previewing and cropping, can save time before actually scanning an image. Most scanners in use with Linux use the Scanner Access Now Easy (SANE) package, which supports and enables graphical scanning sessions.

SANE consists of two software components. A low-level driver enables the hardware support and is specific to each scanner. Next, a graphical scanner interface X client known as xsane is used as a plug-in or ancillary program (or script) that adds features to The GIMP.

A list of currently supported scanners can be found at http://www.sane-project.org/sane- supported-devices.html. Unfortunately, if your scanner doesn't appear on the list, you should not expect it to work with the SANE software. There is also a list on that same page for drivers not yet included, but you must be able to compile the application from source to use them.

Supported USB scanners are automatically detected and the appropriate driver is loaded automatically. The USB devices tell the USB system several pieces of information when they are connected — the most important of which are the vendor ID and the device ID. This identification is used to look up the device in a table and load the appropriate driver.

You will find that Fedora successfully identifies and configures most modern USB-based scanners.

Many scanners are supported in Linux. If yours is not, it still might be possible to use it. The Kooka and Xsane scanner applications are included with Fedora and are fairly straight forward to use. They can both be found in the Graphics menu as the Scanner Tool.

Оглавление книги