From Mageia wiki
Revision as of 06:53, 31 May 2013 by Jharms (talk | contribs)
Jump to: navigation, search

Creating support for the EPSON Perfection V370 scanner

Mageia does not support the popular EPSON Perfection V370 scanner - the reason is lacking upstream support in the Sane Project (http://www.sane-project.org/sane-mfgs.html#Z-EPSON).

This note documents how support for this scanner can be created by fetching and installing packages made available by EPSON at their download center.

Downloading packages from the EPSON Download Center

Go to the download center (http://download.ebz.epson.net/dsc/search/01/search/?OSC) and fetch the following package-files

  • iscan-2.29.1-5.usb0.1.ltdl7.x86_64.rpm
  • iscan-data-1.22.0-1.noarch.rpm
  • iscan-plugin-perfection-v370-1.0.0-2.x86_64.rpm

(this is for a 64-bit machine, packages for 32-bit machines are also available). Store these files in a local repository, and dont forget doing urpmi.update for that repository.

Installing the packages

The iscan package fetched from the EPSON site replaces programs provided by the standard Mageia packages - therefore, you must first un-install the package sane-backends-iscan and, only then, install the new packages (to be done from a root-shell):

   urpme sane-backends-iscan
   urpmi iscan
   urpmi iscan-data
   urpmi iscan-plugin-perfection-v370

Registering the V370 driver as a plugin for the iscan interpreter

Run

   iscan-registry interpreter usb --add 0x04b8 0x014a /usr/lib64/iscan/libiscan-plugin-perfection-v370.so.0.0.0

(on a 32-bit machine, the directory will probably be /usr/lib/iscan - to be verified)

0x04b8 and 0x014a are the usb "vendor-id" and "product-id" of the V370 scanner - they should be the same for each individual piece of hardware; this can be verified (must be verified in case you use the procedure for supporting another type of scanner) by

  1. making sure that your scanner is connected and its power is switched on
  2. doing lsusb
  3. in the output of that command, finding the line that ends with something like "Seiko Epson Corp": the colon-separated pair of 4-digit hex numbers are what you are looking for.

Finally, you need to reboot

Afterwords, you can verify that the scanner is correctly configured by doing

   scanimage -L

Summary, caveat

This procedure works both for Mageia-2 and Mageia-3 - however, it has only been tested on 64-bit machines. Once the installation is completed, the scanner works perfectly with both command-line iscan and the xsane GUI.

It is important to apply this installation procedure during the initial customisation process after system-install or, at least, before Linux has searched for a scanner device. Otherwise, the scanner will not correctly recognized - in that case, repeating the steps described above will not help. This approach being rather empirical, I do not know the reason why the only way to get things right again is a complete re-install.

Looking at bugzilla, the support of several EPSON scanners appears at present to be broken. It is not unlikely that this approach of replacing the standard Linux sane backend by the Epson iscan package plus a driver fetched from the Epson site could provide a workaround for some specific devices.