[sane-devel] Firmware for Epson 3490 Perfection does not upload to scanner

[Jurgen Defurne]

Hello,

I am busy trying to get a brand new Epson Perfection 3490 PHOTO at work under SANE.

I am running on Debian unstable, scanimage (sane-backends) 1.0.18; backend version 1.0.18.

One of the problems with this scanner are the many contradictory messages, which sometimes 
say that it is possible to make it work, sometimes it seems other people have the same 
problem, but it never seems clear what the real solution to the problem is. One extra 
problem is that the proprietary parts of the system are only distributed as rpms.

Currently, I have my system configured for the epkowa driver.

After testing the system also under Windows XP, I have come to the conclusion that the 
problem sits somewhere in the uploading of the firmware file 
/usr/share/sane/epkowa/esfw52.bin. The epkowa.conf file is configured to find this one, and 
it is available, but when running 

SANE_DEBUG_EPKOWA=128 scanimage

I get the following messages as part of the output :

[epkowa] sane_init, ># Change to the fully qualified filename of your firmware file, if<
[epkowa] sane_init, ># firmware upload is needed by the scanner<
[epkowa] sane_init, >firmware /usr/share/sane/epkowa/esfw52.bin<
[epkowa] attach_one(firmware /usr/share/sane/epkowa/esfw52.bin)
[epkowa] EPKOWA SANE Backend 1.0.18 - 2006-05-22
[epkowa] attach(firmware /usr/share/sane/epkowa/esfw52.bin, 1)
[epkowa] attach: opening firmware /usr/share/sane/epkowa/esfw52.bin
[epkowa] attach: open failed: Invalid argument

These are its ownership and access modes.

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 64000 2006-06-20 21:49 /usr/share/sane/epkowa/esfw52.bin

The following step would have been that I compiled the sane software myself, and adding more 
messages, but before I do this I would like to know if there are other people with the same 
scanner, and if they have succeeded in getting it to work ?

Regards,

Jurgen Defurne