[ILUG] Printers, scanners, CD-RW's and such. I just love Debian's apt -get!

[John Gay]

After the feel-good factor of getting my CD-RW and printer working the other
night, I decided to try my scanner next.
The scanner is an AGFA 1236 SCSI scanner. This is supposed to be supported in
sane 1.0, with a new back-end from Kevin Charter dropped in. The down side was,
Debian 2.1 has sane 0.74. Sane 1.0 is only available in the unstable version.
After getting apt-get installed and trying it a few time, by verifying my system
wasn't too broken, I set it up to point at unstable, rather than stable, told it
to get sane, and it down loaded a lot of other stuff as well. Mostly gtk and
gimp stuff. After almost two hours downloading packages, it installed everything
and reported no errors!?! I had to re-boot, as my scanner wasn't turned on
first, and 'Shock-N-Surprise', the scanner worked first time, and was even
set-up for gimp as well!!! I scanned a few images, and printed them out, just to
show off Linux to the wife and daughter. Unfortunately, when I 'fixed' my
system, it removed xmms, which some nice soul had re-compiled to run on 2.1,
even though it was only available for unstable. Using apt-get again fixed this
little problem nice and neatly. KEWL!

Feeling a little more adventurous, I tried to do a full upgrade, but, alas, I
didn't have enough space on my hard-drive for that. I decided to aim a little
lower. I used apt-get to fetch the new version of timidity, because I like the
was it plays my midi's. This decided to install perl 5.004 and perl 5.005, along
with dedconf, xaw-wrappers and loads of other stuff??? The perl installed and
configured properly, but debconf and xaw-wrappers failed for some really strange
problem, which I think is related to the perl upgrade. this left timidity and
other packages unable to install? I guess I just bit off too much at once. Maybe
it will work after another re-boot. Otherwise, unstable is suppose to freeze in
a few weeks time. So, by Feb or so, I should be able to upgrade everything then.

Barring this little hick-up with timidity, I was really impressed with the was
sane installed, configured gimp to use xscanimage AND recognised my scanner
right off! Setting sane up to recognise the right scanner seems to be a bit of a
chore, and that's according to the sane developers mailing list.

Just thought I'd let you know how a newbe likes Debians new apt-get utility.

Cheers,

     John Gay