Those of you who've been playing along at home will probably
remember that I decided quite recently to get my wife a scanner
for our anniversary. (And yes, it's really for her; she has
clients that occasionally require lots of scanning.) After
reading up on SANE, I opted for a Microtek scanner, since the
back-end appeared to be in a pretty stable beta state.
The Scanmaker E3 seemed to be a good inexpensive choice, but a
friend who owns a chain of computer stores didn't have one, and
I had no luck at the local stores either - CompUSA said they
could special order it but it'd take 10-20 days; OfficeMax just
plain doesn't carry Microtek, and Best Buy doesn't carry their
SCSI models. So I wound up ordering an E3+ from PC Connection.
They said it'd take 2 days instead of the usual overnight
delivery, since their warehouse was doing inventory... but it
got there overnight. :)
Wednesday I did all the hardware installation and hookup, and
was able to use "modprobe" to get Linux to realize that the
card was in there, but I couldn't get any further. Now, this
is a somewhat interesting computer - it started out with only
200 megs of disk, so a full install of Linux was not an option.
We've since added another 1.2 gigs, but I'm still installing
new RPMs on an "as needed" basis. And the kernel was stock.
My friend Dave, who runs assorted flavors of Linux on all sorts
of machines, volunteered to help me rebuild the kernel and get
things set up. I downloaded GCC, the kernel source, and all
that good stuff.
Thursday, Dave came over and we rebuilt the kernel... after I
downloaded a few more little things, like *-devel library
packages! :) Suddenly, the computer knew that it not only
had a SCSI card, but also a scanner! Yay! We built SANE, but
I didn't see xscanimage. Hmm. I stayed up late, and deduced
that I was missing some GTK libraries, so I got all the latest
GTK stuff, and built it again. That was more like it. I ran
xscanimage from the command line, and it worked like a charm.
I copied it into the GIMP plug-ins directory, started GIMP,
and it didn't show up. Further poking around resulted in the
realization that I was missing the GIMP development libraries,
so I got them, rebuilt SANE yet another time, and finally
GIMP recognized xscanimage as a plug-in, as seen on TV. :)
So yes, it works. And quite honestly, for someone who *has*
a reasonably complete Linux installation on their system, and
has SCSI support in their kernel, this would be an incredibly
easy install. It took me several hours, but only because I
had to install an RPM or three for *each* step of the install
process. :)
Interestingly enough, the E3+ might be a little bit different
than the original E3. It shuts its light off after about 10
or 15 minutes of idle time (I seem to recall someone kvetching
about the E3 not doing that). And it apparently supports SCSI-2 -
I commented out everything but "microtek" and "microtek2" in
dll.conf, and it came up using "microtek2" much to my surprise.
I'm going to try commenting out "microtek2" to see if it will
use "microtek" instead, since "microtek2" is allegedly still
alpha.
But I can definitely say that it works, and for $180 including
shipping, it seems like a pretty good choice.
-Dan
-- Dan 'Shag' Birchall, Moorestown, New Jersey. Spam delenda est. Made possible by Cannondale, NEC, Red Hat and viewers like you. http://www.scream.org/maisha/ - The Unofficial Maisha Fan Page. H.R.3888 - Congress's way of saying: Shut up and eat your spam!
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