I plugged the thing in (its a USB scanner, which pulls all its power from the USB bus) and the light went on. However the scanner application which comes with both PCLinuxOS and Ubuntu wouldn’t start up. Time for some investigation. I got a root terminal shell and tried poking around

lsusb showed that the scanner was recognised.

Bus 002 Device 005: ID 05d8:4002 Ultima Electronics Corp. Artec Ultima 2000 (GT6801 based)/Lifetec LT9385/ScanMagic 1200 UB Plus Scanner

And the Sane website told me it was supported.

The first piece of research suggested that I needed to edit a configuration file, /etc/sane.d/gt68xx.conf

I opened this up, and found the following four lines, all commented, so I uncommented the last three.

# Trust Flat Scan USB 19200:
override “artec-ultima-2000″
vendor “Trust”
model “Flat Scan USB 19200″

The xsane application still didn’t want to work though.

Now I tried the command line application scanimage. scanimage -L correctly listed the scanner

device `gt68xx:libusb:002:005′ is a Trust Flat Scan USB 19200 flatbed scanner

But scanimage on its own gave me the following message

[gt68xx] Couldn’t open firmware file (`/usr/share/sane/gt68xx/Gt680xfw.usb’): No such file or directory

OK, so we need to find some firmware. A google search on Gt680xfw.usb revealed two candidates. I made a directory in /usr/share/sane/gt68xx/ and dropped the first firmware in there, taking care to rename it with the correct capitalization. Bingo. Now Xsane works. You can get the file here …

That was easy. And yes, I know I could have downloaded the windows drivers from here, but that wasn’t the point!