Getting the Epson CX7400 scanner working (Fedora & Ubuntu)

Printing has worked well in both Fedora & Ubuntu, but SANE didn't recognize my scanner.

This works in Ubuntu (I expect it will in F11; will add a note when I try). Looking at the sane-project site, I edited /etc/sane.d/epson2.conf, adding:

# for Epson CX7400 scanner, I'm trying this:
usb 0x4b8 0x0838

I still didn't get a scanner showing up in gimp. Based on help from gimp, I tried

$ scanimage -L

to list scan devices. This didn't work, but it suggested I try

$ sane-find-scanner

This found the scanner, but reported that a back-end might be needed.
A little googling got me to try

$sudo apt-get install libsane-extras

This still didn't help.

Installing the iscan_2.20.0-6.ltdl7_i386.deb driver from http://www.avasys.jp/english/linux_e/ did the trick.

I did some test scans, and found at least one bug:

• I acquired a preview from the interface. The default scan settings showed 300 dpi (x and y), but the scan got only the preview resolution.
• Changing the dpi settings to 600x600 showed something dramatically larger;
• changing it back to 300x300 this time got a 300x300 image scan.

This appears to be an xsane initialization issue, as subsequent preview acquisition does not affect the scan resolution.

It turned out to be more problematic to get the scanner working on Fedora-11. The scanner id (sane-find-scanner) was already in place (not sure - perhaps because of previous action of mine?), so I got the iscan-2.20.0-6.x86_64.rpm driver from http://www.avasys.jp/english/linux_e/. It wouldn't install, complaining of a missing /usr/lib64/libltld.so.3 version of a libtools library. There was a version 7, so I tried linking ...so.3 to point to it - no good. I looked through the avasys forums, and found a note about Ubuntu and missing dependency so I decided to try something similar for Fedora.

I searched for a Fedora package that contained this libtools version of the library: I found libtool-ltdl-1.5.26-4.fc10.x86_64.rpm and downloaded it locally. Yum wouldn't install it ("It doesn't update anything." - which it doesn't; I already have a newer package installed).

Someone versant in yum may know how to install older packages when you need them too. I did this:

$ sudo rpm -i --oldpackage libtool-ltdl-1.5.26-4.fc10.x86_64.rpm
$ ls /usr/lib64/liblt*
/usr/lib64/libltdl.so.3 /usr/lib64/libltdl.so.7
/usr/lib64/libltdl.so.3.1.6 /usr/lib64/libltdl.so.7.2.0
$

Trying the libtool command, its version seems unaffected (and loading the right thing). Now installing the iscan 64 bit version succeeded, and Gimp scans with Xsane (same caveat about inital resolution settings not taking applies). Iscan doesn't have this problem (available from gimp in both Ubuntu & Fedora).