6. SANE Frontends

Now that you've got the hardware working, you should probably acquire a suitable frontend if you plan on using your scanner device in X11, which is probably a good idea to look at what you've scanned. My personal favorite is as elegant and functional as any proprietary solution I've seen, xsane. It has an attractive GTK+ based GUI, can save the image to a variety of formats, send an image to the printer, and interface easily with the GIMP. It makes accessing the full color and other potential of your hardware quite easy.

The GIMP, or GNU Image Manipulation Program, is an outstanding application for image editing if you are interested in scanning from within a Photoshop™-like application. The xsane module may be available as a separate package depending on your Linux distribution. After starting GIMP, click 'File,' then 'Acquire' followed by 'Xsane:device dialog' to access your scanner.

Another highly recommended frontend is Kooka of the KDE desktop environment. It has an intuitive interface that integrates easily with other KDE applications and can greatly simplify management of large image collections.

Xscanimage is a somewhat simpler (but still powerful) scanner application for X11 to acquire images from your scanner. It may or may not come bundled with the SANE backends depending on your distribution. See man xscanimage for more info.

You can find a more complete list of SANE frontends at the SANE frontends page.