A great first experience with Linux scanning

Today I tried to scan something using Linux for the first time. Although must hardware I want Linux to talk to general works well, I still have a number of memories of finesses and fussing with things to get them to work (moreso from the distant past than recently). This is what I expected out my first Linux scanning experience.

Instead, It was an very impressive experience. I plugged the scanner in and it was recognized. I easily found and installed a scanner package called Xsane using Mandrake's built-in Software Installer. (I just searched for software with 'scanner' in the description').

XSane needed no configuration to talk to my scanner. From my experience using Macs with various scanner, I recall that usually each scanner has it it's own specific drivers to install and software to use, often with mediocre features and inteface.

I needed to install no additional drivers in this case.

Although XSane was feature rich, it was easy to find just the details I needed to adjust the colors, rotate and crop the image, and save it in a file format of my choice.

I would say that XSane is the best scanner interface software I've used so far.

With Kprinter, it was easy to complete my task by turning the 7 PostScripts I had generated into a single PDF. I simply needed to open the files in Kprinter, and then choose the "Save to PDF" option.

It was a pleasant first experience to discover this Linux desktop software that was not just "good enough", but excellent.

I look forward to more "Just Works" experiences.