I have seen instances where Canon document scanners stop working after the upgrade from Edgy to Feisty. Being as I have not yet tested this in Gutsy yet to see if the Feisty bug has been fixed, this may also apply to Gutsy users as well. This even be a problem on other distributions in addition to Ubuntu. So if you are having issues with your scanner, especially with a Canon scanner, keep reading. Remember, these are not all-in-one printers. I am talking about basic document scanners only.

If you recently upgraded to a new release of a Debian based distro and your Canon based scanner, here is something to try out. First install “scanbuttond” from apt-get or whatever you use with your Linux distribution.

Now open up a terminal and paste in the following:

scanbuttond -r 1000000

Now try opening up Kooka or XSane again and see if you are able to create a preview scan successfully. Chances are good that this will do it by itself, now you simply need to make this automatic for each system boot. In GNOME, open up Sessions from System, Preferences and create an entry for this command.

scanbuttond -r 1000000

If you are using a KDE based distro on the other hand, you will need to create an executable script to toss into the Autostart folder in ~/.kde/autostart. Personally, I see this as yet another reason why Ubuntu uses GNOME over KDE, but that is just me.

Regardless, this tip ought to have your Canon scanner working if you have suffered the problems of an upgrade. For further diagnosing, come back tomorrow or part 2 of this series.

[tags]scanner, canon, all-in-one[/tags]