Using scanner with FreeBSD. A nightmare!

[Rob]

Olaf Hoyer wrote:
> 
> Just checked some archives to get the grasp...
> Well, on the german lists we had this discussion about scanner
> compatibility some time ago, and back then I tested our Scanner @work
> (also a 5200c) with my notebook.

Could you give me a pointer to this discussion?
Since I do understand German, I could learn from this without
reinventing the wheel.

> I think the warm-up of the device is a bit slow, before it actually will
> do something.

I find it so terribly slow in comparison to its operation on Windows,
that I think it's not the HP scanner, but the software, or the way
I use the software.

Also the quality is miserable. Although that is probably my mistake,
I use the software with its default settings. It should be strange
that the defaults result in miserably low quality pictures....

I have changed the scan from "Lineart" to "Color"; this allows me to
have a long, long coffee break until the scan is finished!

------------

One more thing I do not understand: I always have to give
"hp:/dev/uscanner0" as the device parameter to the scanner command.

When I do "xscanimage", I get
  [xscanimage] No scanners were identified. If you were expecting something
           different, check that the scanner is plugged in, turned on and
           detected by sane-find-scanner (if appropriate). Please read
           the documentation which came with this software (README, FAQ,
           manpages).

But "xscanimage hp:/dev/uscanner0" works fine.

However, "sane-find-scanner", returns the scanner, vendor, product etc:
     found USB scanner (vendor=0x03f0, product=0x0401) at /dev/uscanner0

And "scanimage -L" returns:
   No scanners were identified. If you were expecting something different,
   check that the scanner is plugged in, turned on and detected by the
   sane-find-scanner tool (if appropriate). Please read the documentation
   which came with this software (README, FAQ, manpages).

Is there a configuration file where I should define the default scanner,
i.e. "hp:/dev/uscanner0" ?

A side effect of this is (I believe), that sane doesn't work as a plugin
with Gimp. I think Gimp first tries to probe the scanner devices, it doesn't
get any, so the plugin doesn't work. Or something like this.
(Yes, I have compiled sane with "WITH_GIMP=yes").

Thanks for the help.
Rob.