A friend has given me his old scanner, an Epson 3490 Photo. I'm trying to get it to work under Linux Mint 12.

Epson's website does not seem to have any links to download any drivers from. http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/s...rm=OSF_O_LINUX

The info is there, but the download link is not there.

From various Googled advice it seems I may need a driver called esfw52.bin.

This information appeared on a forum:

Sounds promising, but the wget command returns 404 not found.

I have downloaded the tar file from this page: http://download.ebz.epson.net/dsc/se...h/searchModule

... but what do I do with it now? Is it even what I need?

There is one link: http://ubuntuforums.org/attachment.p...2&d=1249447768 but this says I need to be registered with this forum before I can download anything, assuming the file is even there.

"lsusb" returns "Bus 001 Device 003: ID 04b8:0122 Seiko Epson Corp. Perfection 3590 scanner" so presumably that's fine.

"scanimage -L" returns:
device 'snapscan:libusb:001:003' is a EPSON EPSON Scanner flatbed scanner.

So it definitely recognises it. I'm not sure if my friend has the driver CD with it. A search for that driver doesn't return anything useful - many of the links date back to 2007 and are now out of date.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

I am using Simple Scan. When I click "Scan" it says "Unable to connect to scanner", although it does appear in the list of scanners to choose.

Thank you for any help you can give. I think this is a driver issue but I cannot locate one.

It's not the driver that's required, it's the firmware. Hopefully, you can extract Efsw52.bin and move it to /usr/share/sane/snapscan/ directory. Then edit snapscan.conf so that the firmware entry points to the correct location.

Depending on your desktop environment, it should be possible to right-click on the tarball and extract the required file. Root privileges will be required for moving the file and editing snapscan..conf.

This is the main problem - I cannot get access to that file from anywhere. I cannot find it on the internet - just plenty of references in Linux help forums to needing it! The Ubuntu Forums link above, assuming it is of any use or still current, requires you to have a Ubuntu One account (which I'm not prepared to set up just for that) to gain access or even read the message.

Can anyone else who has a Ubuntu One account access that link, as the best bet, download this file and attach it to a message in this thread please?

In an effort to assist, I have searched the Epson site for the required package. Search the Epson site for 3490

http://download.ebz.epson.net/dsc/search/01/search/

There is Linux support provided. You'll see that there is a 'iscan-plugin-gt-f520-1.0.0-1.c2.i386.rpm' package available. Don't worry about the RPM format. Just download it, and open it with ark (or equivalent). You should be able to extract the required firmware file (esfw52.bin) from there.

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Ah! Thanks for that - I recognise that search page on the Epson site because I went there already. Perhaps it was the rpm format that put me off downloading that file before. I have rooted through the package and extract the .bin file, and will try it.

EDIT: Yes, it definitely works now. Thank you again for your assistance.

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A newbie started memorial day w/ linux 19.04 and didn't want to ask questions w/o doing research first - used your suggested commands in terminal and my epson 3490 now works with simple scan. Thank you again Steve W.