A Note On Scanning

I should mention, as a very long aside, that I almost couldn’t scan those picture for that last post.

When I left my old job I had to return all the corporate hardware–which meant all the machines that were even vaguely current in my house. Part of what I’ve been doing over the last few days is dragging some ancient machines out and setting them up with modern software–putting Windows 7 on the ancient workstation I’m writing this on (which was, until recently, still running NT 2000 server…i.e. it was at least three major Windows operating systems behind the times), taking an ancient Thinkpad and getting a clean install of XP on it (and making it work with a snazzy 802.11n card), taking a not-quite-a-relic Dell Inspiron and putting the latest Ubuntu on it (and getting that working with an 802.11n card as well–laptop wireless on Linux, still not painless, but WAAAAY easier than it used to be). I also got my snazzy new Ideapad S10-2 for Christmas and I’ll probably be Ubuntu-ing that soon, although for the moment I’ve contented myself to just stripping out all the pre-installed cruft.

Anyway, the point is that the scanner was plugged into the workstation, and I discovered that Win 7 just doesn’t support my old ScanJet2100C scanner–no driver, no plans for a driver. In theory I could have installed the software on the Thinkpad or the IdeaPad and used them to scan, but neither of those is supposed to live in the office where the scanner lives.

I was this close (I was doing review comparisons and checking stock online for various local stores) to just using this as an excuse to buy a new all-in-one laser printer/scanner thing (I had to give back “my” laser printer as well, and I miss it), when it occurred to me that I might be able to scan from the Ubuntu box–I’d never tried that before.

I popped into the Ubuntu Software Centre (something else I hadn’t really played with yet–I had still be using the Synaptic during the install) and searched for the term “scan”. The first hit was a program called XSane, and it appeared to already be installed. Apparently it’s part of the default install set. Nice.

So I plugged in the scanner, and ran the program. Long story short: everything just worked, and the XSane tools are much nicer than HP’s Windows tools were. Everything was completely intuitive, and without needing to open a manual or a web page I was able to scan exactly what I wanted.

So just to review: On XP, need special USB patch, and the UI is ugly and stupid. I have no idea about Vista. On Win7 the scanner is a boat anchor. On Ubuntu, it just works, and as a bonus the UI is smart and pretty. And preinstalled.

Draw your own conclusions.