Resurrecting my OpticSlim 1200 scanner

I have an old Mustek Opticslim 1200 scanner from way back. I never was able to get it to work with SANE, and it wasn't until recently that I decided to dust it off and try it again. The development work on the driver seems to have progressed somewhat as I was finally able to get it running on Ubuntu.

Unfortunately, the scanner doesn't work with the xsane client that comes with the base Ubuntu CD. For it to work, I had to install the SANE backend.

sudo apt-get install sane

Here's where I got a little confused. The scanner is made by Plustek, and the company has its own drivers section. But apparently, I'm supposed to use the gt68xx driver instead.

A couple more steps were necessary:

1) Look for the appropriate driver from http://www.meier-geinitz.de/sane/gt68xx-backend/. For the OpticSlim 1200 turned out to be cism216.fw.

2) Copy cism216.fw into /usr/share/sane/gt68xx.

To access the scanner, I had to invoke

sudo xscanimage

xscanimage comes with the sane package. It's fairly basic but it gets the job done. More on it in a later post. (I needed to run it via sudo for now, but I suspect that once I log back in, I can run it as an ordinary user. It should also appear in my GIMP menu.)

Below is a sample scan.