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It barely handles multiple devices at all.

After all, TWAIN is not SANE.

why not download Knoppix and give it a try?

I know Linux can't write to NTFS partitions, but can it read them reliably?

If you're not going to share what your legacy applications are, how are we supposed to know whether WINE runs them?

Let me scan down my start menu. I see GIMP, Emacs, and several programs that didn't originate on the Linux side: AIM and MSN with file transfer capability, ATI TV Wonder VE video input card driver, Canon S520 printer driver, Cool Edit Pro, Maple V 5.1, Microtech 4850 scanner driver, Modplug Tracker, Olympus D-340L camera driver, Outlook Express with Hotmail support, QuickTime 6 with all the codecs that come with QuickTime 6, and StepMania (is pyDDR any good?).

OK, so I check some of this list against Codeweavers' application database. Modplug Tracker seems to work. Maple has not been rated in Wine. (There exists a Linux version, but my school didn't have it, and now that I'm out of school, it'd be way too expensive for me to buy.) Cool Edit Pro seems to hang on the splash screen for many people. Outlook Express's EULA prohibits running it in Wine. My scanner seems to be unsupported, but gphoto can pull pictures from my camera, and the TV Wonder VE has a Brooktree chipset (which supposedly works).

They can query their modem remotely and check in other ways to determine if it's their fault or yours.

Thanks. I was hoping Comcast wouldn't be one of those ISPs that say 'if you're not running Windows, we'll assume everything's your fault.'

I say hit them where it counts: don't buy camera's with silly proprietary protocols for transferring fotos. All digital camera's that use a form of USB mass storage will work perfectly under Linux, in my experience. Pretty much to plug and play. Plug it in, tail /var/log/messages for USB messages to see which device in /dev/ its been assigned, and mount it. Easy. Using it in Windows 98 SE was a lot more work, having to install some funky driver first.

On the other hand, my girlfriend bought a nice scanner for a very nice price. A HP Scanjet 3500c, which uses USB, but isn't supported *yet* by SANE, so I still need "that other partition" if we want to scan stuff. Linux support wasn't one of things she looked for when she bought it, unfortunately.

Cheers,

Costyn.

For example: no Linux support for my printer. I don't have my scanner working yet.

Printers
Scanners

CD burning: well, OK, when I've worked out how to do it in 2.2.18.

Kernel 2.2.18 is positively ancient and you need to upgrade it if you want any "new" devices to work. USB support in particular is much better in kernel 2.4 than it was in 2.2. If you want to get your CD-RW working, Search comp.os.linux.hardware for keywords "CD-RW howto" since questions involving CD-RWs get asked and answered there all the time.

Wireless hub setup via USB? Nope. USB ADSL modem? Nope.

See above comment about better USB support with new kernels. USB networking is a Goddess-awful kludge, but some devices do work... you know how to use Google, right?

Winmodems? Nope.

The linmodems page has a lot of information on which ones work (many Lucent models, some Conexant, some others) and links/HOWTOs for getting them working.

Digital camera? Who knows...

The people on comp.os.linux.hardware? Most USB digital cameras appear as USB Mass Storage devices, plug in, "mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/camera", copy all the pictures to your hard disk. USB Mass Storage support is much better in kernel 2.4 than is was in 2.2, so upgrade!

You might be better of asking this question on the sane mailinglist.

The SANE folks have gone to great efforts to get various scanner/camera devices to work in an open source environment. In some cases the manufacturer provided all the information needed to interface to the device; in other cases the interface has been found exclusively through reverse-engineering.

I highly recommend that you look closely at the list of supported SANE devices and choose a device known to work from the list. If you go into your local computer store and buy something off the shelf without looking at the SANE list, you are *very* likely to end up with a product that is completely unsupported in any useful environment.

The SANE folks have gone to great efforts to get various scanner/camera devices to work in an open source environment. In some cases the manufacturer provided all the information needed to interface to the device; in other cases the interface has been found exclusively through reverse-engineering.

I highly recommend that you look closely at the list of supported SANE devices and choose a device known to work from the list. If you go into your local computer store and buy something off the shelf without looking at the SANE list, you are *very* likely to end up with a product that is completely unsupported in any useful environment.

I thought SANE only did scanners.

since i didnt see it mentioned i figured i should throw in a plug for SANE as that's what i use with my scanner. their supported devices page lists some HP scanners which are supported and also has a link to further USB specific info. the USB page has this to say about the HP 3300C:

There are rummors that like the HP5300C this is actually an Avision scanner and could be support by the Avision backend. However at the moment there is no positive confirmation of this.

even if this scanner isnt specifically supported yet, there apppears to be lots of other supported hp scanners which you (or someone else) could work from. dont give up yet.

since i didnt see it mentioned i figured i should throw in a plug for SANE as that's what i use with my scanner. their supported devices page lists some HP scanners which are supported and also has a link to further USB specific info. the USB page has this to say about the HP 3300C:

There are rummors that like the HP5300C this is actually an Avision scanner and could be support by the Avision backend. However at the moment there is no positive confirmation of this.

even if this scanner isnt specifically supported yet, there apppears to be lots of other supported hp scanners which you (or someone else) could work from. dont give up yet.

Check it out:

SANE

lots of nifty things, be sure to check out WinSane and XSane.

Have fun in linux.. say bye bye to window$(tm).

I am trying to create a "book-reader" for a friend who is losing his sight, & now cannot read print. He cannot claim against any insurance, so this has to be an "economic solution". Thus Linux is a very viable platform for us. I have found a suitable scanner controller, ( http://www.mostang.com/sane/, ), and a pretty good text to speech system ( http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/ ). We like the fact that it is possible to choose a voice with which we are comfortable. The missing link is the OCR component. There doesn't seem to be anything out there in ftp-land which works sufficiently well for us. As I only have a relatively limited amount of time and level of skill, and cannot catch up with the details of 20 years of Neural-Network technology overnight, this has to be a rather better goer than trying to get an "academic project" to work properly. If IBM could help with this one it would earn big Brownie-points I'm sure of that. I'd be more than happy to make available any glue files I create.

I was an OS/2 user and really miss the WorkPlace shell and the "e" ( Watson Works ) editor. IMHO "e" is a much better editor than anything currently available for Linux. If these things could be made available for Linux this /. reader would be a very happy chappie indeed. As OS/2 is really no longer a commercial earner, I'm sure that there wouldn't be any real financial loss in doing that, and there is the possibility that KDE and GNOME would benefit considerably.

Lastly is there a genuine implementation of REXX available for Linux?

I haven't ever tried SANE either (since I only have the winmodem-like SCSI card that came with the scanner, and it isn't supported by Linux), but I still looked around at the website for SANE a while ago, and found that you can do exactly as described in the above message.
saned runs as a server on the computer with the scanner, and then the clients all use SANE with the sane-net driver (the webpage calls it a backend, but I'm pretty sure it is like a driver) to access the remote scanner. A list of platforms that SANE supports is listed here, and there are also clients available for several other platforms, such as windows (which is likely to be in use if it is a home network), and even a CGI frontend to allow access over a web browser if there isn't a dedicated client available for your OS of choice. The list of related projects such as the mentioned clients can be found here, and SANE's website is here.

I haven't ever tried SANE either (since I only have the winmodem-like SCSI card that came with the scanner, and it isn't supported by Linux), but I still looked around at the website for SANE a while ago, and found that you can do exactly as described in the above message.
saned runs as a server on the computer with the scanner, and then the clients all use SANE with the sane-net driver (the webpage calls it a backend, but I'm pretty sure it is like a driver) to access the remote scanner. A list of platforms that SANE supports is listed here, and there are also clients available for several other platforms, such as windows (which is likely to be in use if it is a home network), and even a CGI frontend to allow access over a web browser if there isn't a dedicated client available for your OS of choice. The list of related projects such as the mentioned clients can be found here, and SANE's website is here.

I haven't ever tried SANE either (since I only have the winmodem-like SCSI card that came with the scanner, and it isn't supported by Linux), but I still looked around at the website for SANE a while ago, and found that you can do exactly as described in the above message.
saned runs as a server on the computer with the scanner, and then the clients all use SANE with the sane-net driver (the webpage calls it a backend, but I'm pretty sure it is like a driver) to access the remote scanner. A list of platforms that SANE supports is listed here, and there are also clients available for several other platforms, such as windows (which is likely to be in use if it is a home network), and even a CGI frontend to allow access over a web browser if there isn't a dedicated client available for your OS of choice. The list of related projects such as the mentioned clients can be found here, and SANE's website is here.

I haven't ever tried SANE either (since I only have the winmodem-like SCSI card that came with the scanner, and it isn't supported by Linux), but I still looked around at the website for SANE a while ago, and found that you can do exactly as described in the above message.
saned runs as a server on the computer with the scanner, and then the clients all use SANE with the sane-net driver (the webpage calls it a backend, but I'm pretty sure it is like a driver) to access the remote scanner. A list of platforms that SANE supports is listed here, and there are also clients available for several other platforms, such as windows (which is likely to be in use if it is a home network), and even a CGI frontend to allow access over a web browser if there isn't a dedicated client available for your OS of choice. The list of related projects such as the mentioned clients can be found here, and SANE's website is here.

I haven't ever tried SANE either (since I only have the winmodem-like SCSI card that came with the scanner, and it isn't supported by Linux), but I still looked around at the website for SANE a while ago, and found that you can do exactly as described in the above message.
saned runs as a server on the computer with the scanner, and then the clients all use SANE with the sane-net driver (the webpage calls it a backend, but I'm pretty sure it is like a driver) to access the remote scanner. A list of platforms that SANE supports is listed here, and there are also clients available for several other platforms, such as windows (which is likely to be in use if it is a home network), and even a CGI frontend to allow access over a web browser if there isn't a dedicated client available for your OS of choice. The list of related projects such as the mentioned clients can be found here, and SANE's website is here.

the SANE project does have support for the older color quickcam (barely) but it may server as a starting point.
I know that they have support for some USB scanners as well, but I'm not sure how different the protocols are for the cameras.

the SANE project does have support for the older color quickcam (barely) but it may server as a starting point.
I know that they have support for some USB scanners as well, but I'm not sure how different the protocols are for the cameras.

Supported Scanners Some USB scanners are now supprted, but expect USB support to be reworked in a year or two once people figgure out how USB works best. (ie right now USB is in a state of quick hacks and amazement that things work. Things are looking better, as work is going on, but I get the feeling that the programers are not sure how to do USB best/right

There are scsi scanners that are unsupported. There are one or two parrelle scanners that happen to work. There are usb scanners that will never work, and usb scanners where the manufacture hopes they will work soon.

I have a microtek V6USL which works just fine, though only were the very latests backend (which I don't belive is intigrated into any current versuion of SANE yet)

I have a windows box just to play games and run my scanner, I don't use it for any real work.

Just out of curiosity, would SANE be sufficient to handle your scanner under FreeBSD (or any other flavor of UNIX, including Linux, free or not), or does SANE have no driver for it or are there also Windows applications you need?

(There's also WINE, for some Windows applications, although I think they may still warn that it's alpha code and not everything will necessarily work.

Hopefully Nikon makes a Video for Linux driver for their camera. It's nice to have all the devices under a single device.

Sure, but by the looks of it, there are at least three such interfaces in development: Video for Linux (for video input), SANE (for scanner input), and gPhoto (for input from digital cameras). The three of them have different foci, so a project merge is somewhat inadvisable. But there are also instances where it would be convenient to use the same interface to different devices.

I doubt that there is a simple solution to this, and I don't know if these projects are working together, but I do know that it would save a lot of work if you only had to write one driver to a common interface, instead of three.

I've been noticing lately that a lot of the higher-ups in the Linux crowd seem to be snubbing some types of hardware, as in,"Aww, that's shitty, you don't want that under Linux," when it should/used to be "We don't care *what* your hardware is, we'll get it to work under Linux, and work WELL!" Case in point: I have a Microtek parallel scanner, for which there is no support under Linux. If you go to the Microtek section of the SANE homepage, you'll see that the developers actually *laugh* about the fact that their drivers will never support parallel port scanners. Now I know a SCSI scanner is better, and I would've gone with SCSI if I did a reasonable amount of scanning, and it wasn't that much more of an investment to get a card. (Don't reply to this saying "you can get a cheap card at a flea market" or some crap, I know what a bitch it can be getting those types of cards working *at all.*) So how about it? Am I/are we wrong to assume the Linux community should support all types of hardware, regardless of how crappy it is? Generally, the people using it are aware of how bad it is. But most of us are left with no other choice.