Scanner joy

Took a few days of research on various web forums and tinkering around with the system, but I finally managed to get the scanner (Epson Perfection V200) working under Fedora 8. Now it’s not a paperweight anymore! One more thing to take off the list. Woot!

In the hopes that this might help someone else who runs into this (or a similar problem), I’ll describe what worked for me.

Started off with using yum to install the SANE packages, but didn’t get anywhere with that. More Google and forum searching led me to the epkowa drivers (iscan-2.8.0-1.c2) so I downloaded and installed those. Got a little further, but still no joy.

Finally I uninstalled all the SANE and iscan stuff (which ended up uninstalling the printer drivers too, but those were easy to put back) and just installed iscan. That got me to the point where I could run iscan as root and scan stuff, but not as a regular user. Then I found a tip on a forum to edit /etc/sane.d/dll.conf and comment out the epson line. Finally, scanner joy!

iscan doesn’t have nearly as many features as Epson’s Windows software but it works, I can use the scanner and it’s not a $70 paperweight anymore.

Summary (this is what worked for me):

• If you have sane/xsane installed, remove it with yum remove sane xsane. On my system it also removed my printer drivers (hpijs and hplip), but they can be reinstalled afterwards.
• Download the latest version of the iscan RPM and install with rpm -ivh iscan-xxx.rpm
• Edit /etc/sane.d/dll.conf and comment out the epson line. Make sure there’s a line that says ‘epkowa’ and that it’s uncommented.
• You should be able to run iscan from a terminal window or launch Scanner Utility either from the Applications menu or the desktop icon