HP scanjet 4370 on Gutsy Gibbon (Ubuntu 7.10)

Here's how I got our scanner working on Gutsy.

Install sane:

sudo aptitude install sane sane-utils

Then find out where your scanner resides:

sane-find-scanner

You're interested in the series of usb ports that your usb is connected to:

found USB scanner (vendor=0x03f0 [hewlett packard],
product=0x4105 [hp scanjet], chip=rts8822L-01H?) at libusb:007:006

In my case, the scanner is plugged into usb port 007 and subport 006 (I have no idea if that's the proper way to talk about it, but you'll see that it will work to think like that)
Then, you need the driver for your scanner, so go to the sane supported devices page and find your scanner. You access the driver by clicking under the 'Backend' link.
At least in theory, this driver is supposed to be in the sane-backends distribution. I'm not sure where to get it (already come with sane?). Anyway, my device wasn't really recognized when firing up 'xsane' until I downloaded and installed the driver.
Now, we have to set the permissions such that we can access our scanner. Notice that we use the the usb port information gleaned about to accomplish this:

sudo chmod a+rw /proc/bus/usb/007/006

A person is supposed to be able to automate that process, but I haven't figured it out yet. In any case, we can now fire up sane with the command 'xsane' or install 'gimp2.0-quiteinsane' to access from within gimp.