Installing a Scanner in Kubuntu

Note: For Linux Newbies like me, who are more familiar with installing drivers in Windows, installing drivers in Linux is difficult, we're not familiar with a lot of the processes involved. This is my personal experience trying to install a scanner driver in Kubuntu Linux.

My wife gave me her old scanner, an Genius Colorpage-Vivid 1200xe, about a month ago. When I got it, I immediately attached the scanner to my old PC to test if I can scan something. It did not work, the program I used, Kooka proclaimed that "no scanner was found" and that "Your system does not provide a SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy) installation, which is required by the KDE scan support."

I did a little research at that time and it seemed to me that if I have to install SANE in my system, I would need to bein a better frame of mind lest i again hose my system.

Today after several weeks I tried again. Did some more research, found out that I needed the SANE gt68xx backend for my particular scanner. Fortuitously, while trying to install libsane-extras using adept-manager, I found out that the gt68xx backend is already present. I did not need to install the damn thing, I just needed to get my scanner program to recognize it.

Searched some more, found some advice to also install sane, sane utils and xsane and xsane-common, which I did. Trying to scan with xsane gave me a different error message, "Failed to open device 'gt68xx..." Which, with another couple of google searches led me to believe that I need to download the scanner's windows driver and place the CCD569.fw file in the /usr/share/sane/gt68xx/ folder.

I was able to download the driver and was able to install the driver in wine to extract the CCD569.fw file. Unfortunately, the gt68xx folder was read only so I had to copy the CCD569.fw using the the command line. My first attempts using the command 'sudo copy /folder/file /folder/' gave me the 'command does not exit' reaction from the PC, apparently Linux does not recognize the 'copy' command, I had to go back and google the copy command for linux. Which was cp.

Using the cp command, I was able to copy the CCD file to the gt68xx folder and was able to scan my first picture in Linux



As more people use Linux, the manufacturers will likely include Linux drivers in their cds and installing scanners will be as easy as it is in Windows. But with a little googling around (making sure that the hardware you buy is supported in Linux), most people can already enjoy using their peripherals in Linux