This post is about the experiences I've had connecting a Canon CanoScan 4400F scanner to various computers, primarily focusing on my current laptop which, as of the time of first writing this post, ran Linux Mint 19 "Tara" MATE along with Microsoft Windows 10. For context, I am hoping to scan some of my personal & work notebooks for personal archival. I figured that this scanner, which I've had for a long time, does a good job at rendering images, even though it is quite old & slow, so I should continue using it for as long as it continues to work.
I used to use this scanner regularly with my previous laptop, which is an ASUS U30Jc and, when I last ran it regularly, ran Linux Mint 18.3 "Sylvia" along with Microsoft Windows 7; initially when I connected the scanner to the old laptop (a few years ago), it didn't work with Linux Mint out-of-the-box, so I decided to do all scans in Microsoft Windows and then transfer files between partitions later. I stopped using that laptop approximately 2 years ago, and since then until the beginning of this month, it just sat in a box gathering dust. At the beginning of this month, desirous of using this scanner again for the aforementioned purposes, I brought out the old laptop & scanner, but found out that in the intervening 2 years, the damage to the laptop's screen & hinge had worsened, the battery had completely died due to no charging in that time, and the laptop (on either OS) would randomly overheat & shut off. At this point, I now believe that old laptop should be junked.
My current laptop is an ASUS ZenBook UX331UN. I didn't think the scanner would work with it, because it uses USB 1.1, and I remember having trouble getting this laptop to read an older USB device. Just for the heck of it, I decided to connect the scanner to see what happens. Just as with my old laptop, in Linux Mint, the Simple Scan application didn't find any connected scanners. However, I had the idea to run the command "sudo simple-scan" from the terminal. That showed that the scanner was in fact being recognized, so this was probably a permission problem; I also realized that the earlier problem with another old USB device was specific to that device and not a general issue with this laptop reading any older USB device. That said, when I tried to scan a document, I got a window showing the error "Failed to scan: Unable to connect to scanner". Follow the jump to see more.