2. I've succesfully installed the deb, what's next? - trufanov-nok/old-epson-drivers-epkowa-for-x64 GitHub Wiki

First of all - connect your scanner and run sane-find-scanner command. You shall find something like this in its output:

found USB scanner (vendor=0x04b8 [EPSON], product=0x011d [EPSON Scanner], chip=LM9832/3) at libusb:003:021

Remember vendor and product ids. This output means that your system sees some usb scanner and able to recognize its model. 2. Secondly, you have to disable free Epson backend for SANE (plustek) and enable Epkowa backend. Edit /etc/sane.d/dll.conf. Find there lines:

plustek
#plustek_pp

and make sure both are commented. Then add new line:

epkowa

This will enable newly installed backed and disable plustek one. I prefer sudo nano /etc/sane.d/dll.conf as console text editor, but you may use any with sufficient privileges.

You must enable management of your device by Epkowa backend. Open its config file (sudo nano /etc/sane.d/epkowa.conf). Find line #usb 0x04b8 0x0110, uncomment it (or just add an uncommented copy) and change ids to your device vendor (most probably the same) and product id. In my case these will be:

usb 0x04b8 0x011d

Save it.

You shall test if your device is now accessible by 32-bit frontends. They can access it directly via 32-bit libsane (which is installed as a deb dependency). The package contains iscan 2.10 (Epson's Image Scan! for Linux). It's 32-bit. Just launch iscan command and you shall get GUI and be able to scan images.

If you everything is ok till now than you're ready to set up 32-bit ver of scaned daemon which is a part of package. It shall be already registered in systemd. Just execute following commands:

sudo systemctl start saned32.socket
sudo systemctl enable saned32.socket

You can check service status with:

sudo systemctl status saned32.socket

output should be something like:

● saned32.socket - saned32 incoming socket
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/saned32.socket; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: active (listening) since Thu 2018-11-22 12:10:47 MSK; 1h 53min ago
Listen: [::]:6566 (Stream)
Accepted: 12; Connected: 0;
Tasks: 0 (limit: 4915)
Memory: 224.0K
CGroup: /system.slice/saned32.socket

laptop systemd[1]: Listening on saned32 incoming socket.

If it's fine now you shall instruct 64-bit SANE to look for scanners over net. In fact it'll look just in your local pc. Edit /etc/sane.d/net.conf and add or uncomment following line:

localhost

That's it. Save the config and try any 64-bit SANE frontend. I prefer KDE's Skanlite. You also may try xsane which is a part of xsane package.

P.S. Note: my device take some time to worm up with this native driver. But it works fast enough after that. Fater than with plustek. Also in your backend may appear model specific "Wait for key" option and it may be turned on by default. If it so, your scanner will do nothing after receiving command until you press and hold a hardware button on it for a while. Make sure you disable this option before scanning or you'll wait device for readiness forever.