Scanning with sane

In April 2002 I bought an old scanner, an Epson GT-6000.This is an old SCSI-Scanner, and all sources said I would have no problems using it with SANE.
Unfortunenatly this wasn't the case. During initialization the epson-backend passed some commands which the GT-6000 doesn't understood. As a result the GT-6000 wasn't recognized and SANE refused to work.
The code which caused the problem, was solely looking for the name of the device, so I simply disabled this test for all old scanners and hardcoded a name ("GT-6000" of course). You can download my patch, which is against Version 1.0.8. It should be working for all old scanners from epson.Feel free to change the name to something which matches your hardware, but that's not necessary, as sane uses this information solely for the information of the user.
Applying this patch is as simple as always: Unpack the source distribution of SANE, go to sane-backends-1.0.8/backend, type patch < path-to-patchfile. After that you have to compile and install the whole package.
Now my scanner works just great. I use xsane as frontend, which is far superior over xscanimage, the SANE-Distribution standard graphical frontend.

Scanning covers

I bought the GT-6000 because I wanted to scan the covers of all my CD, so that they can be displayed in my CD-Database. All covers from one CD are placed into one subdirectory, whose name reflects the CDDB-Id of the CD. Because I didn't wanted to scan all images interactively, I wrote some small scripts:

cddbid returns on stdout the CDDB-Id of the CD which is inserted into the CD-ROM. It uses disc-cover.
scanBack scans a back-cover, which has to be located in the lower right corner of your scanner. It uses scanimage, which is included in SANE.
scanFront scans a front-cover, which has to be placed in the upper right corner of your scanner.
scanCD uses the above three programs to create a Directory ~/cd-cover/$(cddbid), in which it places the scans of the front- and back-cover. If you source this script your working directory after this scans has changed and you can scan more covers of the CD right into the correct directory.

I prepared an archiv with this four scripts. Depending on your installation you have to change them.
Afterwards I use the GIMP to prepare all the scans. These are then copied into my public-html-Directory and there I create thumbs of all the scans with this script.