Recently I had cause to want to scan something with my old trusty CanoScan FB630U on my installation of Vista 64bit.
Turns out Canon haven't produced drivers for it, so it seemed I was out of luck.
A quick Google search turned up VueScan, which did actually work. However, I wasn't willing to spend the $40 price tag to get rid of the demo watermark.
I was thinking I would have to take it into work where we use Windows XP, which I know has drivers for this scanner.. but then I remembered I had VirtualBox with Ubuntu 10.04 installed in it.
I plugged in my scanner, told Windows to ignore the device and not to install drivers. Then I loaded up VirtualBox, went to the USB settings and added the scanner to the list of usb filters.
Loaded up the virtual machine, and instantly Ubuntu had detected the scanner and allowed me to use it to get my images into GIMP.
Another successful open source solution to corporate obsolescence.
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