I am unable to install my UMAX Astra Slim 600 scanner (USB) on Mandrake 10.0 Official. It is not listed as supported hardware. When I select a model with a similar name, I get a "scanner installed" report - but when I run Sane, it says "no device found". On the Sane site (via www.mostang.com/sane) this particular model is not listed, not even as unsupported. The UMAX site has nothing either. There is no trouble at all scanning in Windows 98. Help appreciated

I've been running Linux for over three years and have run Mandrake, Slackware and now Debian. My scanner is now supported by sane-backend, but I still can't get Debian to link to it. If you need the scanner, my suggestion is a dual boot with Windows.

It pretty much takes a distro developer to figure these things out. My advice is to keep checking the latest versions of sane, till it is listed as supported. If you really want to dig deep (like I did) and still not get anywhere, install usbutils and usbview. With those you can check the device ID and see if it's the same as a scanner that's supported. The list to cross reference is in a /udev folder in the sane_backend source folder. There's a file, README.linux that can be a lot of help, also in the sane_backend source folder.

Thanks, Greg. In the 19 months since I made my post, I've moved to Mandrake 10.1 and then to Mandriva 2006. Same scanner, but as before, runs only with Win 98. Haven't checked Sane for some months, but this rather shabby scanner is unlikely ever to be supported. I may get somewhere with usbutils and usbutils, of course, but I don't know if I want to bother. Thanks again.

Its pretty confusing but first you must find a driver that suits your scanner. There is probably one there ,download it as per instructions .

But it don't end there. For some reason the sane.d config files set up scanners as sort of defaults and you must go into these config files and un-comment your model and comment out the default scanner.

One driver suits a lot of models and I suppose there has to be a default model at the start.

Once working though I found the sane program to give excellent scans and better control than windows

I suppose I could look some more, tytower, but I spent hours on this. Manage well enough in Win 98, dual booting, as should be clear from my first post. Greg, I see that I wrote "usbutils" a second time when it should have been "usbview". Thanks for not ticking me off.