NOTICE : the information in this FAQ is old. The latests update was 2008. I keep it available for those who are still interested.

1. Intro

This FAQ is intended to relieve the SANE-developers mailing list of some questions that are asked relatively often. The original FAQ was created by Nicolas de Peslouan. This is a continuation of that FAQ. It is primarily targeted at users, not developers.

Please keep sending corrections and additions to me. ljm@xs4all.nl If your message seems to get lost completely, see spamfilter.html for the reason why this might be

If you're responsible of a part of the code and people ask you the same questions over and over again: drop me a line. If you answer a question on the mailing list with the remark that it is a faqish-question, I might take the hint. There may be some time between your message and the FAQ-update; I will try to search the mailing list at least once a month with the keyword "faq".

Bear in mind that, I am only a simple FAQ-maintainer, not an expert on all common problems. If things do not work:

• Read the installation doc.
• Read the doc on sane
• Read the doc that came with your backend/frontend that seems to cause the problems
• Read this FAQ

1.1. Thanks

I am not the author of this faq. I see myself more as a collector. As an example: I shamelessly copied the original FAQ by Nicolas. Therefore, many thanks go to the people that actually answer the questions, among others: Andreas Rick Abel Deuring Bernd Schroeder, Bill Pool, Daniel Naughton Douglas Gilbert, Henning Meier-Geinitz, Karl Heinz Kremer, Marcel Pol, for most of the parport part, Matthew Duggan, M.B.W.D. Buitenhuis, Nicolas de Peslouan, Nick Lamb, Oliver Neukum, Oliver Rauch, Davide Giunchi Steve Sheriff, Timothy Little, and all those who maintain backends.

1.2. Legal stuff

Copyright ljm and others. You may copy this, as long as no fee is charged and the names of the contributors and the maintainers are mentioned.

This FAQ is provided "as-is" without any warranties, expressed or implied. While some (not even all!) effort has been taken to ensure the information in this faq is correct, neither the contributors, authors or collector/maintainer can assume any responsibility for errors, ommisions or damages resulting from the use of any information from this FAQ. In case of legal problems, only Dutch law is applicable.

All personal information, including e-mail addresses, is provided for the use in the context of SANE and/or scanners only.

1.3. Meta info: What Where How

The SANE-faq is a digest of problems and questions related to the installation and usage of SANE. It provides little programming information. Many of the questions appeared in the SANE-mailing list (and were answered), others come from different FAQs, newsgroups or mailinglist I visited. There is even some information I knew myself!

The latest (most recent) version can be found at: http:/dullaart.website/sane Note that the information in this FAQ is old; it has not been updated since 2007 (except to add this warning).

This FAQ is created using the vi-editor and in3xml

1.4. Completeness: How complete is this faq?

Not. These are a Few Answered Questions, not all Frequently Answered Questions. Please continue sending additions/and corrections, eventhough my feed-back is not always what it ought to be.

1.5. Contributing to the FAQ

After a long vacation, I will try to rewrite the part about scanning as root only, since many questions apeared on the list about this. Also I have seen a lot of problems with kernel upgrades.

If you have suggestions on what there should be in the FAQ, mail me.