After nearly 2 days of wrestling with my new
Epson Perfection V300 Photo USB Flatbed Scanner, it's working! I'm not going to admit to all the stupid things I did. I tried the SlackBuilds for iscan but they didn't work this time which is a first for me.
What I found after much searching was the V300 used a Sane backend named "epkowa" plus required a plugin named "esci-interpreter-gt-f720". I found rpm packages at:
http://avasys.jp/hp/menu000000500/hpg000000442.htm
iscan-2.20.0-6.i386.rpm
esci-interpreter-gt-f720-0.0.1-2.i386.rpm
I used src2pkg to convert them to Slackware packages:
src2pkg -VV iscan-2.20.0-6.i386.rpm
src2pkg -VV esci-interpreter-gt-f720-0.0.1-2.i386.rpm
I installed the resulting src2pkg packages with pkgtool then made some other system changes. I added my user to the scanner group in /etc/groups. Then I added "epkowa" to /etc/sane.d/dll.conf. Next I opened a bash window as root and issued:
lsusb
sane-find-scanner
These gave me the vendor/product numbers and the USB hub/device numbers and also let me know my device was "not known".
This is the point I lost a great deal of time. I didn't see anything in the documentation or searches that told me I need to run the following:
iscan-registry -a interpreter usb 0x04b8 0x0131 /usr/lib/esci/esci-interpreter-gt-f720
That command created the file /var/lib/iscan/interpreter and now my scanner could be found. The green Power/Scan button flashed and it started to make noise with:
scanimage -L
It's alive! Some of the other nice commands available at this point are:
scanimage -d test -T
which checks out if sane is configured properly which it was and:
scanimage -d epkowa -T
which told me my Sane epkowa backend was good to go. The last step for me was to issue a command to change device permissions so I could use the scanner as my normal user, not just root:
chown root:scanner /dev/bus/usb/001/00x
where x is the device number from the earlier lsusb command.
This is not a perfect solution. I'm probably missing something on udev that would make this easier. All I know is my V300 is working and I want to spread the word that the Epson V300 works in Slackware!