Sane and Cups Installation and Configuration on Debian

These instructions are more than 5 years old, and could be completely outdated.

Sane (Sanner) Setup

1. Install sane
apt-get install sane

2. Edit /etc/hosts.allow
ALL:localhost

3. Debian creates a scanner group, but no users are in this group. So add users to the scanner group in the /etc/group file under scanner.

4. To see the devices on the usb bus use any of the following commands. With the mount command you should be able to see the usbfs.
$ cat /proc/bus/usb/devices $ lsusb

5. To run sane type $ xsane. Each time you scan an image a file is placed in /tmp directory.


CUPS (Printer) Configuration

1. On debian cups installs three packages.

2. After the above packages have been installed, you need to get a PPD file for your printer from openprinting.org. Using the printer database at linuxprinting.org you can select your printer then download your specific PPD file. For example save the PPD file kyocera-FS-1000plus-pxlmono.ppd to the /usr/share/cups/model/ directory.

3. Download foomatic-rip and foomatic-gswrappers

4. Restart cupsys
#/etc/init.d/cupsys restart
Restarting the service will cause cups to find the ppd file in /usr/share/cups/model/ and convert it to text and place it into /etc/cups/ppd/ directory.

5. To install and configure the printer go to http://localhost:631/printers in your web browser. The username and password is the same as the root account.
a) Click on printers link, then click the add printer button.
b) Click the print test page button.
Finished.

6. After installation you can install xpp (X Print Panel) to adjust margins and print odd and even pages (this program could be outdated). To see the drivers compiled into Ghost Script use the $gs -h command. PCL printers use the pxlmono driver. Foomatic.rip which is a perl script passes a command to gs that enables gs to convert the document to the native printer code.