If you are one of those that depends upon a scanner for your daily work, and you want to handle this task using the Linux operating system, you are in luck. In the past, Linux has had some serious issues with scanning tools. When USB scanners replaced the old parallel port scanners it seemed nothing would work. But, as usual, Linux caught up and USB scanner support started appearing. Now many scanners are supported under Linux and the tools available for scanning have improved greatly. The improvements in scanner support have been made possible by the Sane Project.

The first thing you will want to do is check the Sane supported scanner listing on the Sane Project site. But don’t let your scanner not being on that list stop you. My Epson Perfection V30 was not on the list and I still managed to get it working with the help of iscan. The iscan package is a simple scanning tool for Epson scanners. You can find the iscan tool within Synaptic. The iscan tool also integrates perfectly into The GIMP, so all your image needs can be met within one tool. But iscan is not the only option. There is also the Xsane tool, which is far more powerful than iscan. Let’s take a look at both of these scanning utilities to see how scanning is handled under the Linux operating system.

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