Epkowa/Guide

Guide page for Epkowa.

What is it?
Proprietary driver for some Epson scanners.

Why might it be needed?
To support Epson scanners not supported by a standard SANE backend but listed as supported by Epkowa driver.

How does it integrate with Gentoo?
The Epkowa driver in included in media-gfx/iscan which is a proprietary Epson scanner utility. Some Epson scanners require an additional plugin. These plugins are packaged separately as media-gfx/iscan-plugin*.


 * Question: Is a plugin always required by iscan?
 * Question: If no plugin is required is the scanner likely to work with standard epson or epson2 SANE backend?
 * Question: Does the need for a plugin correspond to a dependency on Epson firmware?

Plugins have a dependency on media-gfx/iscan and media-gfx/iscan-data

Once installed Epkowa can be used by other SANE compliant scanner utilities such as xsane in the same way as any other SANE backend.

Installation.
If the scanner requires a plugin emerge the appropriate media-gfx/iscan-plugin* package. This will pull in media-gfx/iscan and media-gfx/iscan-data as dependencies.

Licenses.

Unstable?

Issues with media-gfx/iscan-data
media-gfx/iscan-data currently broken (see bug).

Workaround (see also suggestions in bug reports)
Check dependencies of iscan-plugin*  and emerge these separately.

For iscan use --nodeps to avoid pulling in iscan-data which will cause build to fail.

Emerge you plugin using --nodeps to avoid pulling in iscan-data which will cause build to fail.

This should leave you with a system in which the scanner is found by scanimage -L and sane-find scanner using root account but not as normal user.

Manually adapt udev rules to add USB vendor and device id (see ref, man udev, SANE etc).