Setting up a scanner in linux is insanely simple. Or I just got insanely lucky. I have a SCSI UMAX Astra 1200S scanner that was just lying around and hooked it up to my laptop’s docking station (this dock has a SCSI port!). I booted up Debian on my laptop, installed sane-utils with aptitude (sane stands for Scanner Access Now Easy), typed in “scanimage >image.pnm” and out popped a lovely image of a lightbulb i had put on the scanner so I could tell it worked!
Yey for Linux!