You might remember that a couple of years ago, I bought an EPSON scanner – a GT-S50, no longer sold, replaced by the GT-S55 – to scan invoices and other kind of documents that I had laying around. The investment paid off, in my eyes, because now I have all my documents digitized, always available, and I was able to fill quite a few bags of shredded paper. The amount of work involved in digitizing that many documents without a professional scanner would have costed me in time much more than the device costed me in money.
But as I noted in the blog post above, to get the scanner to work on Gentoo Linux, I had to create ebuilds for a new package with the proprietary plugin that can handle the scanner — it’s not a sane plugin per-se, it’s rather a plugin for the EPSON-provided epkowa backend, which is otherwise opensource. I actually ended up adding two packages to the tree to be able to do that.
Nowadays, the media-gfx category hosts a number of plugins for epkowa, under iscan-plugin and esci-interpreter prefixes — the latter is the case for the GT-S50; as far as I can tell, the main difference between the two is that the latter ships with no firmware, but just a protocol interpreter, as the name suggests. Together with this, I maintain another ebuild for the plugin (32-bit only) and firmware (32- and 64-bit) for my older Perfection 2580 scanner, plus two more packages that I proxy for users who can actually test on good hardware. Today I even added another package for a scanner I don’t own, but I plan to buy when I settle down in my new residency (the 2580 stays here with my mother), the Perfection V370 which is the first one in our tree that actually uses “perfection” in the RPM name.
The ebuilds are almost identical to one another, but there are quite a few tricky bits around them. First of all, we don’t install in exactly the same locations as the RPMs — the reason for this is that they use /usr as base path for everything, but in our case, since these are provided by an external source, and are pre-built, they are installed in /opt instead, with the exception of the firmware, that stays in /usr/share simply because that’s where some of the software looks for it (namely, snapscan backend for SANE).
Some of the plugins are valid for multiple USB IDs, as is the case for the GT-S50/55/80/85 interpreter, while others are only valid for a particular ID – which may refer to multiple models anyway, as sometimes it refers to the main controller on the device, which may be shared — in the case of the 2580 noted above, it shares the same flatbed with the 2480; the difference between the two models is all in the lid, in both it hosts the lamp for scanning film, but in the 2580 it also includes the motor to load the film semi-automatically.
You can easily see which IDs the plugin applies to by using strings on the rpm and look for iscan-registry — but at this point question should be: where do you get the RPM? Well, unfortunately AVASYS no longer provides the download at a known location; EPSON themselves are distributing it, through Akamai — which means that we can’t point to the upstream servers anymore, and euscan won’t be able to find a new version being released. To solve this situation, the solution we opted for is to mirror the rpm files on my webspace on dev.gentoo.org including the needed documentation. It’s not very flexible, of course, but at least it works and it does not require us to fetch-restrict anything.
It’s hard for me to tell how many more plugins for iscan are out there, but if your scanner is among them, feel free to send an ebuild for it on our Bugzilla and CC me — you can base yourself off media-gfx/iscan-plugin-perfection-v370 which is the latest I committed.