I have an odd problem. I'm using Mandriva Free 2008 RC2 and a Canon N1240U scanner. I have xsane installed and another scanning app called gscan2pdf. If I use the latter, then there are no problems detecting the connected scanner and actually scanning something. Everything works great.

In xsane everything starts normally. The app starts, detecting the scanner which is correctly identified, but when I click on the 'scan' button xsane seems to progress through a scan -- and even gives me a blank page in a file. The problem is that the scanner does not react in any way; no light, no movement, zilch. Any ideas?


[moved from Hardware by spinynorman]

Is the scanner connected as a USB device or through Firewire ???.

Also you should use the Official Release of 2008 rather than the rc2 since there were a lot of bug fixes in between and it could have already solved your problems.

I currently have no scanner detection for my Firewire connected Epson Perfection Photo 2450 Scanner ( works perfectly in Mandriva-Spring from which I am doing this post). There is a work around but I do NOT regard that as a solution.

Cheers. John.

You may not have a usable backend installed.

(as root)
According to the SANE documentation, your scanner is supported via the "plustek" backend.
You may also try Vuescan (easy to setup, excellent output quality, but commercial and expensive...). The available demo will watermark your scans.

Thanks Scarecrow and John. Sane-backends are installed actually, with xsane reading the scanner as plustek (as scarecrow mentioned). I think I'll try John's advice and move up to the official release. I'll see what happens then. I am fairly new to Linux, having started with Ubuntu, but I have found Mandriva to work very well overall on my rather old machine (HP Omnibook 6100). I wouldn't be surprised if everything just worked! Many thanks.