SANE is short for Scanner Access Now Easy. Scanner access, however, is far from easy, since every vendor has their own protocols. The only known protocol that should bring some unity into this chaos is the TWAIN interface, but this is too imprecise to allow a stable scanning framework. Therefore, SANE comes with its own protocol, so the vendor drivers can't be used.
SANE is split into back ends and front ends. The back ends are drivers for the supported scanners. The front ends are user interfaces to access the backends.
Download (HTTP): http://www.sane-project.org/
Download (FTP): ftp://ftp.mostang.com/pub/sane/sane-backends-1.0.12/sane-backends-1.0.12.tar.gz
Download (FTP): ftp://ftp.mostang.com/pub/sane/sane-frontends-1.0.11/sane-frontends-1.0.11.tar.gz
Download size: 2.7 MB (Back ends), 180 KB (Front ends)
Estimated Disk space required: 31 MB (Back ends), 3.3 MB (Front ends)
Estimated build time: 1.44 SBU (Back ends), 0.09 SBU (Front ends)
To access your scanner, you will probably need the related kernel drivers. A SCSI scanner will need SCSI drivers, a parallel port scanner needs parallel port support (you should use enhanced EPP modes) and an USB scanner will need the USB scanner module and a SCSI system for emulation. Be sure that you have got the necessary devices to access the drivers.
Install SANE backends by running the following commands:
./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc && make && make install |
To install SANE front ends, use the following commands:
./configure --prefix=/usr && make && make install |
--prefix=/usr: This switch installs all software in directories relative to /usr.
--sysconfdir=/etc: This switch installs the configuration files in /etc/sane.d instead of /usr/etc/sane.d.
See http://www.sane-project.org/sane-supported-devices.html for a list of available backends.
scanimage: Command line interface for scanning.
xscanimage: Graphical user interface for scanning.
gimp-plugin: xscanimage as GIMP plugin.