Using Sane front- and back-ends with Xsane

[Lisi Reisz <lisi.reisz@gmail.com>]

Using Squeeze with TDE 3.5.13.2

I need some drivers in order to use Xsane with my scanner.  I have downloaded 
and untarred the tarballs for sane-backends-1.0.23 and sane-frontends-1.0.14, 
which are the ones I need, and all the files appear to be there.  But I still 
get the error message <no devices available>

Clearly I have not told xsane where to look.  But I don't know how, so I 
googled.  The best answer I got was this:

<quote>
Probably your PATH environment var is set to use /usr/local/bin before
/usr/bin, so you are using the scanimage binary you compiled with
sane-backends, but you have nothing similar for libraries using
LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

you have two choices: 1. recompile sane-backends to overwrite the
version installed by your OS, or 2. teach binaries to load the sane
libs from /usr/local/lib, see man ld.so
</quote>

So how do I "recompile sane-backends to overwrite the
version installed by your OS"?  How do I tell it to overwrite?  Or how do 
I "teach binaries to load the sane libs from /usr/local/lib"

I have looked at man ld.so.
<quote>
Currently ld.so has no means of unloading and searching for compatible or 
newer
       version of libraries.

       ld.so  functionality is only available for executables compiled using 
libc ver‐
       sion 4.4.3 or greater.
</quote>

I have:
Package: libc-bin
State: installed
Automatically installed: no
Version: 2.11.3-4

I am stuck and this is fairly urgent.  So I am asking for help instead of 
giving myself a day or two to breathe, before trying again.

I would be very grateful for any pointers.

Thanks,
Lisi