Win32/64 Drivers Rant On! (Ubuntu Saves The Day)

May 7, 2010 | Reading time: 1 minutes

Ok. I have *2* old scanners that I was needed to scan some old photos a Canon Canoscan n676u and a Lexmark 2500 series all in one that was included in the computer room when I married Kim.

Neither one of these showed up as a scanner in Windows 7 because Microsoft decides to change the driver model every other release of Windows. It’s really a shame that I had to hook up my Canoscan to my Ubuntu server (which runs the Gnome desktop), and lo and behold the scanner not only shows up, but works PERFECTLY using the Simple Scan program built in.

What’s a shame is that I also ran VMWare Player with my Windows XP virtual machine and I was able to install the Canoscan drivers with that perfectly as well just in case I wanted to scan with my Photoshop 6….but bah.

Free Software saves the week! Hooray for Ubuntu!