Multimedia :: Scanner info

Hi all:
need info on what I would need to use my scanner left over from my Windows days:

Using DSL 3.3 Frugal. (have ext GIMP)

Scanner is: Acer (I think it is now Benq) ARTOP elec
Model AEC6712D scsi Prisa 620ST.
Has pci: ACARD AEC6710D.

Tried looking up info. Do I need both "frontend" and "Backend" files?

Will getting "SANE" do the trick?.
Many thanks for any info.

I believe you can scan from the command line with only sane-backend (scanimage) - at least you can together with hplip. To scan from within gimp I think you will need sane-frontend (xscanimage or xsane) but I could be wrong.

I've been contemplating compiling xsane, but it looks like an awful lot of "dev" files are needed.

Thanks Juanito,
Will lookup sane and see what they offer.

I had a go at compiling xsane - in addition to the usual compile environment, the following headers/libs were required:

sane, usb, jpeg, tiff, gtk1.2/gtk2, x, gimp
[sane = sane-backend, xsane = sane-frontend]

I didn't have the gimp headers so I couldn't compile to scan directly from gimp, but I managed to compile xscanimage.

Anyway, xscanimage brought up a basic scanning window with image preview, resolution adjustment and colour modes and the mydsl gimp extension opened the resulting image file without problems.

Edit: I found gimp headers and after linking xscanimage to gimp plug-ins, I could scan from inside the mydsl gimp extension.

Note: I didn't see any conf/lib files for acer or benq in the sane-backend, so I don't know if this will work for your scanner or not.

Thanks Juanito.

Since my scanner is over 10 years old I downloaded the oldest file from Sane-project "sane-backends.1.0.14.tar.gz" but md5sum fails. Tried three downloads with same results using instructions on page 113 of DSL book.
Will try again in a few days.
Appreciate quick responses.

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