After six months or so of being wowed by a little portable scanner in a doctor’s office, the spouse and I finally decided to buy one. I wanted one that’s compatible with Ubuntu, since that’s our main OS around home, so I did a little research, and found some info about the Plustek Opticslim m12 (it’s the same model that the “NeatReceipts” company rebrands for their own scanners).
Found one on Ebay, bought it (for 1/3 of the price of a NeatReceipts model), and plugged it in… and of course it didn’t work. This is the world of Ubuntu with proprietary peripherals, of course. The “Simple Scan” program that’s built-into Ubuntu recognized the make and model, oddly enough, but it wouldn’t scan, throwing up an error message whenever I tried.
I did a little bit of searching, and found a site that talked about it: http://www.fishandcross.com/blog/?p=844
Apparently, all you need to do is download the driver file mentioned from the site at http://gkall.hobby.nl/gt6816-07b3-0412.html and copy it to your /usr/share/sane/gt68xx folder. Then, just start up the Simple Scan program again, and scan away! Works really well — doesn’t auto-crop or anything like the provided Windows software does, but that’s cool. I’ll take it.
To Visitors: If you’re visiting this page, trying to find information about how to get this scanner to work, and you’re trying it years after this article was written, I can’t guarantee these instructions will work — if you know Ubuntu, stuff changes from version to version sometimes. Hacks and fixes that’ll work one year won’t always work the next.