13 Hardware

 13.1 Scanners
 13.2 Digital Cameras

13.1 Scanners

Only a limited amount of the available scanner hardware is supported under UNIX, if you want to use a scanner with a UNIX workstation (or Linux PC) it is important to investigate the availability of hardware drivers for your chosen platform. SCSI scanners are currently the most heavily supported hardware, support for parallel and USB scanners is much patchier.

The SANE Project attempts to provide a standardised application programming interface (API) for access to any raster image scanner hardware (flatbed scanner, hand-held scanner, video- and still-cameras, frame-grabbers, etc.).

The SANE package is divided into two parts: a selection of backend hardware drivers which support scanners from different Manufacturers, and a variety of different frontend GUI applications that sit ontop of the backend drivers.

SANE has been ported to a variety of platforms including Linux, Solaris and Digital UNIX, although the Digital UNIX port is still in need of debugging and is untested. More information on the SANE Project can be found at http://www.mostang.com/sane/.

13.2 Digital Cameras

The GNU Digital Camera Project supports over 90 different digital camera models with the gphoto program under both Linux and BSD operating systems, see Figure 52. The program is known to run under RedHat Linux 6.1, SuSE Linux 6.2, Linux Mandrake 6.1, Debian GNU/Linux 2.1, FreeBSD 3.2, NetBSD 1.4.1 and OpenBSD 2.6. The package requires GNU sed, GTK+, glib and imlib. If you are running Linux these packages will likely already be installed on your system, however if they do not appear to be present then they can be found at the following sites:

pict

Figure 52: The gphoto interface.

The gphoto package can be downloaded from http://www.gphoto.org/gphoto/download.html, and is available as source code or binary RPMs. If you want to install the package it is recommended that you download the latest stable version as a binary RPM, and ask your system administraor to install the RPM on your system. Configuration is straight forward, plug your camera into a spare serial port and select the appropriate COM Port and Camera Model from the configuration menu. To download images from your camera, go to the camera menu and select the Get Index option.