Q: How can I set up my scanner to work with Saned Daemon under Linux?

A: If for some reason PDF Studio is unable connect to your scanner through the default option of Sane Direct, you might try to connect to your scanner through the second option called Sane Daemon. This option should only be used as a backup as it requires some advanced setup steps to run a process called “saned” on your Linux machine (basically the sane process running as a server…). This is the same mechanism that allows to connect to your scanner through the network.

1) Install your scanner

Plug in your scanner, install the driver and make sure that it works using XSane or Gimp. XSane or Gimp do not require “saned” to be running to be able to connect to your scanner.

2) Run Saned

Using Yast:
Enable sane-port in Yast>Network Services>Network Services (xinetd).

Using Terminal:

Start saned.socket with the following command:

> sudo systemctl start saned.socket instead

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

If the steps above do not work,  please read this entry for more detailed steps https://help.ubuntu.com/community/sane.d%20tutorial

Additional options:

  1. Edit /etc/default/saned and chang “RUN_AS_USER=saned” to “RUN_AS_USER=root”.
  2. If you are using a multi-function printer and have followed all of the steps above to get saned working and it still does not respond, try putting user ‘saned’ into group ‘lp’. This may resolve the problem without having to change the permissions of the USB device to which the printer is connected as that will change with every reboot, but the drivers always sets the appropriate USB port to have permissions ‘root lp’.
  3. If you’re connecting to a network printer, make sure IP address is correct. It has different IP addresses for Wireless and Wired (Ethernet) Network. You can open Terminal and use ping [IP_Address] and see if it responses

Read more tips about troubleshooting scanning in Linux from PDF Studio.

Remember that if you can’t make your scanner to work, you can always use your default scanning application to scan your document to images and then convert the scanned images as PDF pages in PDF Studio under Pages > Insert > Import Images as Pages or even use gscan2pdf which can scan documents directly to PDF.

Note that some advanced scanning features may not be supported by your SANE driver (such as feed scan).