The scanner.o driver used on the 2.4 kernels (note: PLEASE identify the driver that gets "automatically installed" when reporting on USB devices: some systems may not load some drivers automatically. Naming the driver lets people try to load it manually) was dropped from the 2.6 kernel.

But the good news is that xsane (version 0.996, installed from ppa.launchpad.net, not the standard Ubuntu repository*) correctly found the Umax, and my first test scan turned out fine.

I'm not recommending the 3450 because I haven't used it enough to find out how good it is. It could turn out to be great, or junk, in the long run. But I'm posting this info now because I had a hard time finding out whether it was known to work at all with my Ubuntu box.

* In order to get better versions of ffmpeg and libx264, I added:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/hardybleed/ppa/ubuntu hardy main

to my apt sources. When I installed xsane and xsane-common, they came from there. I have no idea whether the "official" version works any better or worse.