Q: As I am trying to set up my scanner to work with Sane and PDF Studio under Linux, I see this error message reading “Failed to start saned.service: Unit saned.service is masked”. How can I resolve this issue?

A: This is a known issue when upgrading to Ubuntu 15.10 or Ubuntu 16.04. You can read more info here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sane-backends/+bug/1577137

To resolve this problem, open a terminal window and type in:

sudo systemctl start saned.socket

Make it start automatically on startup with the following command:

sudo systemctl enable saned.socket

Check if saned.socket is running with the command below:

sudo systemctl status saned.socket

Restart your computer and try to scan again.