A Portal to a Portal

After a number of years out on loan, an old IBM Ideascan USB scanner came back into my life, and after a few weeks of dust-gathering, I decided to pull it into use for a particular project on which we were working.

Trouble is - I bought the scanner back in the 90s and it was a Windows-only device, and I don't use Windows any more ( as most readers will know ).

No problems, I thought, the Mac will just recognise it .... #FAIL, the Mac did not recognise the scanner, and a Google search didn't suggest a short-term solution.

Thankfully, I have a number of PCs running Ubuntu. I plugged in the scanner and .... no joy there either.

Thankfully, a further Google search led me to George Notaras' blog G-Loaded Journal which, in a few simple steps, showed me how to add support for the scanner, using the Viceo drivers, which I was able to add to the stock SANE tool that Ubuntu uses for scanning etc.

The actual blog thread is here: -

Viceo Backend for SANE with libusb support

One thing; using scanimage, I did see: -

scanimage: WARNING: read more data than announced by backend (2979990/2977443)

with a similar message appearing when I used xsane.

Nice one, George, that saved another bit of kit from going in the skip ...