Title photo
frugal technology, simple living and guerrilla large-appliance repair

Regular blog here, 'microblog' there

Many of my traditional blog post live on this site, but a great majority of my social-style posts can be found on my much-busier microbloging site at updates.passthejoe.net. It's busier because my BlogPoster "microblogging" script generates short, Twitter-style posts from the Linux or Windows (or anywhere you can run Ruby with too many Gems) command line, uploads them to the web server and send them out on my Twitter and Mastodon feeds.

I used to post to this blog via scripts and Unix/Linux utilities (curl and Unison) that helped me mirror the files locally and on the server. Since this site recently moved hosts, none of that is set up. I'm just using SFTP and SSH to write posts and manage the site.

Disqus comments are not live just yet because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do for the domain on this site. I'll probably restore the old domain at first just to have some continuity, but for now I like using the "free" domain from this site's new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Wed, 23 Feb 2011

The Epson Perfection V330 scanner and Debian (or any other kind of Linux, for that matter)

I got a deal on an Epson Perfection V330 scanner. It runs great in Windows 7 with the voluminous amount of software on the install CD. I hoped that it would work out of the box with Debian Squeeze. No such luck. Sane/Xsane doesn’t recognize it (although it's in the dmesg).

I Googled for and found a few packages that got me going. (Here's a report of this method working in Ubuntu.)

I downloaded, unpacked and installed the driver and scanning software from Avasys, and with a reboot I was able to scan from my Debian Squeeze laptop.

It all works great. Thus far I've only used the Image Scan! software (yep, the name has an ! in it), which does work fairly well by the way.

I imagine these same packages would work for Ubuntu. There are also packages for Mint, Mandriva, CentOS, Fedora, PCLinuxOS and a few others.

You would think that scanners, especially those by companies such as Epson, would either work out of the box or have packages within the Debian (or Ubuntu) repos, if only in non-free. Guess not.

But since the solution was fairly easy to come by, I'm accepting (and now using) it.

Posted: Feb 23, 2011 04:00am UTC

permalink | comments

Category: /hardware/scanners/

Breadcrumb trail to post: home > hardware > scanners

No previous posts | No more posts