This program is working for me. No need for scanimage anymore. My CanoScan LiDE 30 seems to work again under Ubuntu. Just take care of the parameters in de dialog when scanning from within gscan2pdf.

ppm stands for Portable Pixmap among others like Page Per Minute or Perl Package Manager or ... But I need a pdf from some scanned images. Some searching through Synaptic Package Manager on keys like 2pdf and todpf Unfortunately gscan2pdf has a GUI but it works. So fireup gscan2pdf, add some images, and click the 'pdf' button.

As I have an old CanoScan LiDE 30 and troubles under Ubuntu with SANE I have to use scanimage. It is know as as

scanimage --help
-- last line --
plustek:libusb:002:002

To scan a A4 which is the standard paper size over here is need to use

scanimage -l 0 -t 0 -x 215 -y 297 --resolution 150 > myimage.ppm

gives file size of 6 MB

Problem's I have so far is in the output size of the above line. The mode defaults to color so the scans are huge.

scanimage -l 0 -t 0 -x 215 -y 297 --resolution 150 --mode Lineart > myimage.ppm