Hello! Just wanted to share with you my recently lived experiences with a scanner.
This week I bought an UMAX Astra 1220S scanner. I had been looking for a scanner that worked unfer Linux for some time. I always read carefully all scanner-related messages posted to the Debian lists and to the "Ask Slashdot" section of /. Well, I read pretty good comments about the UMAX scanner so I decided to give it a try. My experience has been completely positive! Everything worked out of the box with no problems at all. I installed SANE, recompiled my 2.1.131 kernel with generic SCSI support and voila! SANE is pretty cool. It even allows you to scan over the network. The command line scanimage utility is very good and the xscanimage X-based utility is very nice too. Debian has packages to convert the output from scanimage (PNM -portable aNyMaP- formats) to almost any graphic format. The scanner+SANE combination together with the HylaFAX fax software is a powerful team that allows to send faxes just like a normal fax machine does. peloy.-