Packard Bell Diamond 1200 Plus Scanner Under Jaunty

[Graham Todd]

This information may be of help to someone else, so I thought I'd raise
it here.

This scanner is a slim flatbed type that would fit in a large laptop
bag, particularly as its not heavy either..  Its powered by a usb cable
only, that stores away when its being carried.  I use it at university
to cut down on photocopy charges, and as its a full A4 sized unit, its
certainly worth having if you don't have an All-In-One.  However, under
Jaunty, you may need to need to jump through a few hoops to get it
going.  So connect the scanner usb cable.

First of all, find out if SANE is installed on your system (I can't
remember if it came with Jaunty or I had to install it separately).
With all that follows, I'll be giving command line instructions, but
installations can be done through Synaptic.  If not installed, then
install SANE and a scanner front end like XSane or Quiteinsane, and if
you use Gimp a lot, also install gimp2.0-quiteinsane as follows:

sudo apt-get install sane sane-utils libsane libsane-extras xsane
quiteinsane gimp2.0-quiteinsane

That should just about install everything! :-)

Next in a terminal, type:

scanimage -L

That command should bring a reply with an answer including a line like
this:

device `gt68xx:libusb:005:002' is a Mustek Bearpaw 1200 CU Plus flatbed

Now this tells us that the scanner is recognised as having the same
chipset as the Mustek Bearpaw 1200 CU and that the backend you need to
have installed is the gt68xx.

The backend is the code that connects SANE to the scanner.  You will
also need the correct firmware, which is the section of code that
allows the backend to work with the scanner's correct chipset.  So go
to the gt68xx backend homepage to find out more at:

http://www.meier-geinitz.de/sane/gt68xx-backend/

The firmware can usually be downloaded directly from the webpage,
though you may need to take it from the introductory (Windows) CD that
came with the scanner: its generally in the format xxxx.usb, so should
be easy to find.  The firmware needs to be installed
in /usr/share/sane/gt68xx/ and precisely which piece of code you'll
need is best checked from the webpage.

In the case of the Mustek Bearpaw 1200 CU, there are three entries in
the list of supported scanners, giving firmware as ps1fw.usb,
PS1Dfw.usb or PS1Gfw.usb.  Personally, I'd download them all and
transfer them to /usr/share/sane/gt68xx/ (you'll need to make sure each
file has root permissions for this).  You can check them individually,
but only when none of them work, do I check each one so there isn't any
conflict. (I found that ps1fw.usb was the correct firmware

There's only one more step before we check the installation and that is
to enter in a terminal:

sudo chmod a+r /usr/share/sane/gt68xx/[name of firmware file]

which sets permissions for the firmware file (for mine it would be sudo
chmod a+r /usr/share/sane/gt68xx/ps1fw.usb).

Now set the scanner to scan something - anything - and let's fire up
Quiteinsane and the scanner should start to work.  Then click on the
Preview button, and then the Scan Preview button in the next window and
all should work.

Hope this helps someone struggling to set up this scanner.