Good Morning Kevin and Kemdi - Thanks so much for all the help. When I booted this morning I observed a wee bit of information flashing by that seemed to mimic what should have resulted if I ran the script file you suggested, so just for fun I jumped into bash and as root ran both sgcheck and chmod, jumped back out to user and ran scanimage. In all cases I got the output as you described so I tried performing a scan. Viola, all worked just as advertised!!! Many Thanks!!! Now all I have to do is get real familiar with SANE. Somewhere along the line I guess I've missed the study of what is a block device, character device, and any other particular device. Advice on where to learn more about "devices" greatly appreciated. At this point as I understand it I should delete the umax2200 directory under root and remove the line in /etc/fstab for /dev/umax2200 BUT there should be a line in /etc/fstab for /dev/sgo. Is that correct. If so, is the file type auto, or something else? And as for linking the scanner, I am unfamiliar with how to make a desktop link with the icon so I can just click on the link and immediately bring up SANE to start scanning. A review of "man link" is about as clear as mud! thanks again, dave