Scanners

We have a couple of Epson photo perfection 3490 scanners around which simple but a pain in the arse to configure because they require proprietary drivers and proprietary firmware. The drivers can be installed via YAST (iscan) but are i386 only which means all sorts of packages need to be change to i386. The alternative and best method is to use the SNAPSCAN driver which can be installed on anything but this does not come with the firmware and requires a bit of manual editing. Here are instructions for installing this:

• Install xsane from (yast2 or zypper)
• Find the firmware (try locate Esfw52.bin or look for it on the internet).
• Put a copy of Esfw52.bin in /usr/share/sane/snapscan/ and make sure everyone can read it (chmod a+r /usr/share/sane/snapscan/Esfw52.bin).
• Edit this file, /etc/sane.d/snapscan.conf, and change the firmware line to read: firmware /usr/share/sane/snapscan/Esfw52.bin

Now you can plug in your scanner and run yast2:hardware:scanners, you have an unconfigured scanner, select and edit this. You'll see a massive list of drivers, narrow it down by including 3490 in the search term. You'll get 2 options, select the snapscan one - this will give you loads of flannel about firmware, don't worry you have already solved this but yast2 doesn't know. Just finish and you should be able to run xsane to get the scanner working.

BTW xsane is capable but hugely irritating so if anyone knows of a better front end let us know!