This morning I tried to use may very old and almost antique scanner Agfa Snapscan e20 with my brand new Ubuntu 9.10 and xsane.
Surprise, surprise, it did not work. So, I started searching for a solution on Google, read myself through many boards and finally constructed this solution from all I read (and thought myself, of course *g*):
1. First of all you need the proprietary Windows driver of your Snapscan device. This can be found here.
2. The downloaded ZIP archive will contain a file called 2.0.0.9-e20.exe. You will need to extract all files from that exe to get a file called snap20.bin. But how do you do that? The file is not a self extracting ZIP archive. So, unzip does not work. In this case wine is your friend:
sudo apt-get install wine
Open the exe file with wine. Leave the initial screen open but do not follow the installation routine further on. Instead, copy the needed file from the temp directory of wine:
sudo cp ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/temp/Drivers/snap20.bin /etc/sane.d/
Now, close the installer.
3. Now edit the configuration file /etc/sane.d/snapscan.conf and add (or modify if present) that line:
firmware /etc/sane.d/snape20.bin
4. Start xsane and start scanning