1.8.2 Scanners in Ubuntu

Setup:
- Fresh install of Ubuntu Lucid Desktop 10.04 on a trusty old Dell PC, Pentium4 @ 2.8 GHz with 2GB RAM and a new hard drive
- New Brother DCP 7040 multi with ADF sheet feeder @ 23 pages per minute (the cheap-yet-fast one perpetually on special at Staples)
- Work through this install script from the Ubuntu Forums: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1124867 (note the update post at the bottom for 10.04)
- Scanning software is "gScan2pdf" easily available from the Ubuntu Software Centre

What I like is the lightning fast scanning, the very simple and clean GUI in gScan2pdf, the ease with which you can tweak things like scanning resolution, auto-rotation and straightening, double sided scanning and the ability to append OCR text to the image formatted PDF output, basically "one button searchable PDF output" functionality. gScan2pdf is a fully featured open source product that can completely replace Nuance's proprietary PaperPort or Omnipage software.

What I still miss is PaperPort's ability to auto-name and auto-save big stacks of paper scans as single page PDF files (very useful when scanning a huge stack of single page documents fast), and the ability to graphically split and merge virtual "stacks" of PDF pages by dragging them around with the mouse in the PaperPort GUI, with the auto-saving function happening on-the-fly in the background. But I can probably live without that. We'll see if my MOAs can.

Since I don't touch my production OSCAR server I haven't looked at implementing Robbie's automated scanning upload script yet...

Gunther