Scanning on Linux will drive you Xsane!

xsane is an excellent tool for scanning on Linux, I've used it for 25 years, since I worked with the developer to resolve some issues running it under Solaris long ago. Until my recent upgrade to Fedora 31, everything worked fine with Xsane, with my old Epson USB scanner and then my Brother network scanner.  All of a sudden, xsane was giving "segmentation fault, core dumped" on start up, but only on 1 of the computers running Fedora 31, my main desktop.  On the others it worked fine. Here's the problem I found:

locnar<885>% gdb xsane
(gdb) run
Starting program: /usr/bin/xsane
Thread 1 "xsane" received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x00007fffee9c07c0 in sanei_scsi_close ()
   from /usr/lib64/sane/libsane-epkowa.so.1

This ibsane-epkowa.so.1 was installed by the iscan package. Once I removed it, the trouble disappeared. I reinstalled xsane and sane-backends, followed by running linux-brprinter-installer-2.2.2-1 and I was back to scanning!

One issue I ran into with linux-brprinter-installer was it tried to install .deb packages and I need the .rpm packages on Fedora. This was because it tests to see if you have /bin/dpkg, which I did along with alien, so it thought I was on the wrong OS.

Learning Linux

The first to understand about Linux is it's not based on Windows, it's not another version of Windows, it's not "like" Windows, it didn't come after Windows, it's not a "free version" of Windows.  These are just common misconceptions repeated by Windows users that don't understand Linux.

Linux is based on the much older computer operating system called Unix.  Unix was around decades before MSDOS or Windows. Windows is derived from MSDOS, which is based on CP/M.

The second thing to understand about Linux is you don't need to "learn" Linux.  No one needs to learn an operating system today.  All you need to know is how to open the web browser and maybe how to copy pictures/music/video to/from the computer.  That's it!  Using a web browser, Gmail, Google Docs is just the same expirence on Linux as it is on Windows. The operating system is just there to enable you to run the web browser, anything beyond that is for computer hobbiests.

What you do need to know is how to get Linux, and it's improtant to understand Linux is FREE.  There's no cost, support is free, all the software that runs on Linux is free too!

Switching from Windows to Linux is much like switching from driving on left side of the road to driving on the right. If you've never driven before, it's easy to learn to drive on the right. However if you started with driving on the left, it's very hard to unlearn what you already know. Most "power users" of Windows are very unhappy with a move to Linux and generally revert to Windows in a very short time for this reason.

To makes things simple

Two main distros