This may be a VirtualBox question more than anything else. The host OS is Win7, which sees the scanner, but has no drivers for it. VirtualBox sees & recognizes the scanner as "Cannon Scan" and shows "state captured" when I hover over USB devices.

Searching gives me many happy reports of this particular scanner being well supported, and that SANE should work with it immediately (also listedin the Supported Hardware List. I get "no devices available" from XSane... and I'm not sure where else I can check. I'd like to see if VirtualBox is telling the truth and find out if the USB port is actually being fed into the virtual OS. Can anyone point me in the right direction of where/how to do that in Ubuntu? Or other bright ideas.

I'm starting with a little project to add some zing to my beginner linux studies - I'm sure I haven't checked some obvious things, because I don't know them yet. ;)