Fixing the Epson Scanner in Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 Issues

I wrote about my upgrade from Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty to 9.10 Karmic in this post. Overall, it was painless. But, with any operating system upgrades there tend to be some small issues. I’ll concentrate on the scanner in this post.

The scanner in my Epson Stylus CX7800 rarely makes it across on OS changes. This time proved no different. I discussed the general recovery procedure in this post and this one. I decided to search the web for new information and found several approaches to the issue. The most straightforward was a PPA repository maintained by DoctorMO. While written for a previous version of Ubuntu, it included both iscan and iscan plugins, the latter in 64-bit. I gave this approach a shot, and it worked…almost.

After setting up the repository and installing the drivers, sane-find-scanner found the Epson:

found USB scanner (vendor=0x04b8 [EPSON], product=0x081f [USB2.0 MFP(Hi-Speed)]) at libusb:002:002

However, “scanimage -L” did not find the scanner unless executed with admin privileges as “sudo scanimage -L”:

device `epkowa:usb:002:002′ is a Epson Stylus CX7700/CX7800 flatbed scanner

The problem lay in the fact that the user doesn’t have write permissions to the device. Changing the device permissions provides a quick approach that would work until the next restart. Using the address that sane-find-scanner provided, usb/002/002 in this case:

sudo chmod 666 /dev/bus/usb/002/002

That works, but only temporarily. The old fix would be to add the affected user to the scanner permission group as I described in this post. The problem is that the developers eliminated the scanner group in karmic, as I found out in this developer discussion 2/3 of the way down the page. There’s a good discussion of the issues that the maintainer of iscan joined, but it boiled down to the scanner group again. Poo. What now?

I returned to Avasys and discovered that they had updated iscan drivers available. I downloaded and installed the new iscan drivers from Avasys. That got karmic to recognize the scanner, which now works perfectly. Mission accomplished!