I tried to install my Medion MD 5345 scanner on Debian 3.1¹, it took some time to find out how to do it. I managed to get it installed and recognised by the driver and it's now working. Here's a short description of how I did it, I hope it helps you if you have the same or another scanner.

To connect a scanner to linux you need Sane, for this scanner you'll need the genesys backend (driver) which is part of the sane distribution from sane 1.0.16. The sane distribution in the debian repository is 1.0.15 and useless for this scanner. There are two options to get the newer version. Download the source and install it manually or you can get a newer version from the unstable Debian repository. I tried installing it from the source.

There is a good manual to install it. After ./configure you may get a warning that usb scanners are not supported because usb.h is not installed. To fix this install libusb-dev in root mode: "apt-get install libusb-dev, you can offcourse use other package managers if you want. Now you may have two copies of sane installed, if you use KDE you can't remove the old version because KDE depends on sane.

Before testing if the scanner is recognised by sane you should make sure you are in the scanner group, else your scanner probably won't be recognised because of permission issues. After installing sane you should test if the right version is used: "scanimage --version" normally this prints 'scanimage (sane-backends) 1.0.17; backend version 1.0.17', but under su it prints 'scanimage (sane-backends) 1.0.15; backend version 1.0.15' on my computer. Then you can test if your scanner is found: "sane-find-scanner" this should return: 'device `genesys:libusb:001:003' is a Medion MD5345/MD6228/MD6471 flatbed scanner ' Next check if your scanner is found by sane: "scanimage -L" this should return your scanner name. And you should be able to start scanning.

Because I compiled sane from the source I have two versions of sane. XSane can't find the scanner, possibly because of this. A workaround for this is to scan with scanimage and save it as a file.