epson scanners ubuntu 12.04.1

Amongst the commands I ran in order to get my Mother's Epson SX425W printer/scanner to work on Ubuntu 12.04.1 were:

(you can get the three .deb files from the epson or possible avasys.jp website)

   19  apt-get install xsltproc
   20  dpkg -i iscan-data_1.13.0-1_all.deb
   21  dpkg -i iscan_2.28.1-3.ltdl7_i386.deb
   22  dpkg -i iscan-network-nt_1.1.0-2_i386.deb

At that point the SX425W will scan nicely from simple-scan, but the older perfection 2480 still doesn't work, even though simple-scan lists it as an EPSON EPSON, so it obviously knows something about it.

Next I tried:

sudo apt-get install xsane sane libsane-extras

That didn't help but installed a much more complicated scanner app called xsane.

Xsane claims it can do OCR, but won't actually unless you also install


sudo apt-get install gocr

Here are some instructions for getting the 2480 working:

http://www.george-smart.co.uk/wiki/Epson_Perfection_2480_Linux

They amount to editing:

/etc/sane.d/snapscan.conf

so that the firmware line reads:

firmware /usr/share/sane/snapscan/esfw41.bin

And then putting the esfw41.bin file that you can download from there in the right place and 

getting the permissions right so that any user can read it.

sudo mkdir -p /usr/share/sane/snapscan

sudo cp esfw41.bin /usr/share/sane/snapscan/esfw41.bin

sudo chmod 444 /usr/share/sane/snapscan/esfw41.bin

Having done this I seem to have disabled the other one though. sigh..