DoctorMo's Blog

This blog entry describes how to get Epson Scanners working in Ubuntu, continue through to my rambling story below… Run these commands in a command line, go to Applications > Accessories > Terminal and then copy and paste hit enter and then restart your machine when it’s finished.

sudo wget -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/doctormo-epson-scanners.list http://divajutta.com/doctormo/ppa/doctormo-epson-scanners.list & sudo apt-key adv –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com –recv-keys 113659DF & sudo apt-get update & sudo apt-get install iscan iscan-plugins

This is what those commands are doing:

1. Installing my Epson PPA
2. Adding my PPA Signing Key (113659DF) to say you trust my packages.
3. Getting a new list of packages, updating.
4. Installing iscan and iscan-plugins packages.

I finally managed to get myself a scanner that functions under Ubuntu, although not without some trial and error. The initial scanner I acquired was a Visioneer OneTouch 9520 (which is going back tomorrow). This scanner didn’t work in any material way based as it is on the gl843 chipset and there may or may not be somebody working on making it work in sane.

Scanned Photo: Martin Cooking

So I went out and got myself an Epson Perfection v500 Photo, didn’t work when I plugged that in either. I was about to give up hope when a search of the internet revealed that it worked because of a proprietary driver directly from Epson/Avasys.

So not content with being proprietary, the linux parts required to install the downloads from Avasys are missing in Ubuntu, iscan (LGPL) isn’t installable because of missing dependencies and none of the plugins are installable without iscan. They’re also heavily Debian based, even the pre-install scripts assume sh is bash and cause problems.

So for both of these I rebuilt them all and put them on my Epson PPA for Ubuntu Users. Hopefully some poor soul with an Epson Scanner will find these useful. To install them add my PPA to your repositories and install iscan and iscan-plugins using apt-get install.

Now there are two notes, firstly I had to add a HAL fdi file to order to set the permissions correctly (an idea which is starting to make me wonder about HAL’s setup) and the SANE project’s apparent ugliness and out of date website and hardware lists (although it also seems under-maintained for a project of it’s importance).

Scanning under Ubuntu is yet another thing that needs attention of a dedicated developer to sort out, but for which we just don’t have enough resources to do anything other that the odd enlightened self interested or arch packaging (I believe iscan should be ready to roll in Karmic).