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Epson Perfection V550 Photo on Slackware 14.2
1. VueScan.
2. Mint VM.
3. The solution.
3.1. Download the bundle from Epson.
The scripted version

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Epson Perfection V550 Photo on Slackware 14.2

After spending the best part of 2 days struggling to install the Epson provided package, searching with multiple search engines and reading everthing I could find on problems with other models I finally found that that solution was almost trivial.

I nearly gave up several times, I wanted to send the kit back thinking it really didn’t work, I thought my server wasn’t working, several times I decided that Epsons drivers simply did not work for the V550 but a couple of things kept me going.

1. VueScan.

VueScan 9.6.5 from Hamrick.com worked straight out of the box proving that

a) the scanner was working and
b) it worked on Slackware 64 14.2.

I was sorely tempted to just shell out the cash and get VueScan but crippled evaluation copies of software applications irritate me greatly. With image detail being removed on saving the document scans and "water marks", which were actually dozens of heavily printed slogans being inserted, it was impossible to properly evaluate the quality of the scan. The proposition of having to pay $80 for a restricted licence to find out just how good VueScan actually is, was not not an attractive one.

2. Mint VM.

Desperate to find an early solution to complete an on line submission on the second day I booted up a virtual "Mint" Linux box and installed the Epson linux driver bundle with their "install.sh". Initially it did not work, in fact I got the same message on Mint as on Slackware "could not send command to scanner" but as this was a virtual machine without any other purpose in being than testing the Epson Perfection V550 Photo installation I was happy to reboot, and hey presto the scanner fired up. I quickly scanned the document I needed to up load and then returned to Slackware 14.2 issue. The contribution of the reboot caused me to think that the problem might lie with "udev".

3. The solution.

The Mint experienced convinced me that the only software needed was that provided in the Epson Perfection bundle so I uninstalled everything that had been suggested online, including the packages from SlackBuild and then

3.1. Download the bundle from Epson.

There seems to be a confusing plethora of Epson web sites, compounded by various national variation in .com, .co.uk etc. some of which get you to a download area and others which don’t. This URL gets you to the right place. You can modify that version number and still get the same download screen, only when you click on the blue download icon does it check whether the version exists.

http://support.epson.net/linux/en/iscan.php?model=perfection-v550&version=1.0.1

Alternatively at present use wget ie.

mkdir -p /src/epson
cd /src/epson
wget https://download2.ebz.epson.net/iscan/plugin/perfection-v550/rpm/x64/iscan-perfection-v550-bundle-1.0.1.x64.rpm.tar.gz

Unpack the bundle

tar xvf  iscan-perfection-v550-bundle-1.0.1.x64.rpm.tar.gz

Change to top level directory created

cd  iscan-perfection-v550-bundle-1.0.1.x64.rpm

Here we find 3 subdirectories core, data and plugins. Others have asserted that the order is critical and that data should be installed first which is what I did but I note that "install.sh" installs "core", "data" and then "plugins" and I suspect that if it does make a difference (which I suspect it doesn’t) Epson are the most likely to have it right.

Change to the relevant directory, convert the rpm to tgz format and install.

cd core
rpm2tgz iscan-2.30.2-2.x86_64.rpm
installpkg iscan-2.30.2-2.x86_64.tgz

Now do the same with data and plugins

cd ../data
rpm2tgz iscan-data-1.36.0-1.noarch.rpm
installpkg iscan-data-1.36.0-1.noarch.tgz
cd ../plugins
rpm2tgz iscan-plugin-perfection-v550-1.0.0-2.x86_64.rpm
installpkg iscan-plugin-perfection-v550-1.0.0-2.x86_64.tgz

Now this is the bit that should be done automatically and is on mint but we seem to need to do manually on Slackware.

iscan-registry -a interpreter usb 0x04b8 0x013b \
 /usr/lib64/iscan/libiscan-plugin-perfection-v550 \
 /usr/share/iscan/esfweb.bin

The iscan-registry command creates /var/lib/iscan/interpreter. You can incidently just create the interpreter file manually with cat or vi as that is all that iscan-registry script does. If you want to verify those vendor and device ids you can plug the scanner in and do "lsusb|grep Epson"

The final bit of the jigsaw is to get the sane using the right backend. This was the information most clouded in obscurity and misinformation which is strange as its native linux stuff.

Sane requires the epkowa backend. You’d think it should be esfweb but no, as others have discovered for many Epson scanners, epkowa needs to be there and it isn’t. My initial solution was to simply add "epkowa" to /etc/sane.d/dll.conf which does work, but checking the way Mint does it you can just add a one word file to /etc/sane.d/dll.d/iscan. I’ve opted for that approach as its easier to script and leaves everything in /etc/sane.d as is,

The scripted version

sudo bash
mkdir -p /src/epson
cd /src/epson
wget https://download2.ebz.epson.net/iscan/plugin/perfection-v550/rpm/x64/iscan-perfection-v550-bundle-1.0.1.x64.rpm.tar.gz
tar xvf  iscan-perfection-v550-bundle-1.0.1.x64.rpm.tar.gz
cd  iscan-perfection-v550-bundle-1.0.1.x64.rpm
cd core
rpm2tgz iscan-2.30.2-2.x86_64.rpm
installpkg iscan-2.30.2-2.x86_64.tgz
cd ../data
rpm2tgz iscan-data-1.36.0-1.noarch.rpm
installpkg iscan-data-1.36.0-1.noarch.tgz
cd ../plugins
rpm2tgz iscan-plugin-perfection-v550-1.0.0-2.x86_64.rpm
installpkg iscan-plugin-perfection-v550-1.0.0-2.x86_64.tgz
iscan-registry -a interpreter usb 0x04b8 0x013b /usr/lib64/iscan/libiscan-plugin-perfection-v550 /usr/share/iscan/esfweb.bin
echo epkowa >/etc/sane.d/dll.d/iscan

And there you go, make sure your a member of the relevant group, usually lp or scanner if iscan is tied down to particular users and fire it up with iscan, Bob is your uncle.

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