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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 (for

  • 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). In the small dialogue proposed by the Epson site, specify "core package&data package" as module name for obtaining the first 2 packages, "iscan plugin package" for the plugin module.

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 just fetched from the Epson site.

Registering the V370 driver as a plugin for the iscan interpreter

Open a root console and run

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

Please note:

  • That command is for use on a 64-bit system; on a 32-bit system, use /usr/lib/iscan/... ;
  • 0x04b8 and 0x014a are the usb "vendor-id" and "product-id" of the V370 scanner - they should be the same for each individual V370 scanner - you can simply copy / paste that command.

If you want to very that these usb identifiers are correct:

  1. make sure that your scanner is connected and its power is switched on
  2. open a console (no need to be root) and type lsusb
  3. in the output of that command, find 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.

The lsusb command becomes essential if this procedure of using Epson packages in substitution to the sane-backend-iscan package is used for driving some other Epson printer.

Finally, you need to reboot

Afterwords, you can verify that the scanner is correctly configured and ready for use:

Open a console (no need to be root) and type

   scanimage -L

Scanimage is a command-line interface to the scanner. The -L option will produce (standard output) a list of available devices - the V370 scanner should appear in that list

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.