[sane-devel] Epson dx4400 support for asus wl500g router

[hagar]

I have an Epson TX110 which was supposedly only supported by epkowa.

I had major problems with epkowa - crashing freezing etc.

I now use the epson2 driver for sane and the TX109 Gutenprint driver for 
cups.

Had no problems since.

I had to play with the detection settings is all.

/etc/sane.d/epson2.conf
usb 0x4b8 0x84d


Alesh Slovak wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Predrag Punosevac wrote:
>
>> What did you mean when you said that "epkowa backend itself is open 
>> source"? Did you mean compiles on Linux?
> The epkowa backend is a fork of the epson backend and it is licensed 
> under the GPL + SANE exception just like any other SANE backend. It 
> does also happen to compile on Linux. The frontend and the binary 
> plugins are, of course, another story.
>
> My statement that "The epkowa backend ... can be compiled for your ARM 
> system" is misleading. What I really meant was since the source code 
> is available, it should be possible to compile for ARM with some work. 
> However, we have never tried it ourselves.
>
>> Epkowa fails miserably to compile on any Unix-es to my knowledge.
>> When I say Unix, I mean Solaris, HP-Unix, BSDs, AIX, Irix. The only
>> very limited success is the work of FreeBSD developer Luigi Rizzo who 
>> was able to port some very old version of Epkowa to FreeBSD. The 
>> compilation even of that source code fails miserably on my platform 
>> (OpenBSD)? And I am not talking here ARM, sparc, or God forbid mips64
>> architecture. I am talking about i386 crap. 
> As a developer, I am interested in supporting operating systems other 
> than Linux. We try to keep portability in mind, but only actively 
> compile on Linux, so incompatibilities are bound to creep in. You are 
> welcome to send us logs or even better, patches. However, I cannot 
> guarantee that any patches we receive will be integrated.
>
> One thing to keep in mind is that the frontend requires a binary blob 
> that is provided only for Linux systems. On non-Linux systems you will 
> only be able to compile the epkowa backend. You can disable the 
> compilation of the frontend with: ./configure --disable-frontend
>
>> Does Epson corporation have a genuine interest in making Epkowa truly
>> open source or it is only PR stunt? I though Epson was in business of 
>> selling hardware not operating systems. That would be a truly sorry 
>> state of affairs as Epson in the past was a leader in producing good
>> hardware which worked on Unix. I have three scanners manufactured by 
>> Epson sitting this very moment next to me and happily working under 
>> OpenBSD including one connected to a SUN (sparc) Blade 1000.
> Again, the epkowa backend is a fork of the epson backend and is 
> licensed under the GPL + SANE exception.
>
>> On the top of that there is the problem that most newer Epson scanners
>> require also proprietary binary plug-in which of course is platform 
>> dependent unlike firmware. For all practical purposes that fact makes
>> most newer generation Epson scanners practically non-usable.
> I'm afraid there is not much I can do about this. Officially 
> registering your complaint at our support site [1] may be one small 
> step towards convincing Epson to change this practice. To be fair, 
> scanners that require a binary plugin are in the minority by far.
>
>> I do not want to sound like a troll. I am offering you a genuine help
>> to compile and debug Epkowa on OpenBSD (which would probably go long
>> way towards real portability i.e. being able to compile on all Unix-es).
>> In the light of new trend (mips64 based laptops) that could be of 
>> benefit to the corporation. 
> If you are interested in getting the epkowa backend compiling on 
> OpenBSD, you are free to hack on the source code and send us patches.
>
>> Can you tell me the name of the person in the corporation whom should 
>> I contact about this. 
> I'm afraid that the best I can do here is to once again point you to 
> our support site [1].
>
>> P.S. For starters could you tell me the exact version of GCC (or any 
>> other compiler that you guys are using) compiler used by Avasys
>> Corporation to produce Linux binaries. Can you produce those binaries
>> with older version of GCC? In particular most post 3.xxx version of GCC
>> are useless on non-wintel hardware. 
> Epkowa and the Image Scan! for Linux frontend have been compiled on 
> versions of GCC since 2.9. These days we compile binaries on Debian 4 
> (GCC 4.1.1), Ubuntu 8.10 (GCC 4.3.1), Fedora 5 (GCC 4.1.0) and Fedora 
> 10 (4.3.2). We are also constantly compiling on Debian testing. The 
> oldest version of GCC that we've compiled with lately is 3.2.2 on Red 
> Hat 9 and that only required a few small fixes to get working.
>
>
> [1] https://avasys.jp/eng/contact/inquiry/inq_form4_en.php
>
> Regards,