Canon CanoScan LiDE 25 on Ubuntu 7.04/Feisty
Please note: as with all my articles, your mileage may vary - anything you do is at your own risk. This guide isn't endorsed by Canon or Ubuntu, and I can't guarantee that your scanner will work with Ubuntu etc.
This is a nice low-end scanner which is on the SANE (software for doing scanning on Linux) compatibility list. It runs off the power provided by the USB cable which is handy. Unfortunately with Ubuntu Feisty the GUI tools for scanning don't work with it properly, but the command-line tools work fine.
You can scan an image and save it as a JPG with something like this (needs scanimage and convert installed - both available through apt-get).
scanimage --mode Gray --format tiff --resolution 600 -x 215 -y 297 | convert tiff:- jpg:scan.jpg
This scans in an A4 document in grayscale at 600dpi. To scan in colour, replace 'Gray' by 'Color' and to change the resolution just replace the 600.
It's not a particularly fast scanner - it takes a couple of minutes or so to do the above command, but the quality is good.
Copyright (C) 2006-8 Ryan Lothian. All rights reserved.