[needs-packaging] iscan

  dpkg --force-overwrite -i iscan...deb
will fix this, see also
  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sane-backends/+bug/133007

Can this please be fixed in Intrepid Ibex? This improves Ubuntu's image/promise of being up to date with commonly available consumer market hardware.

Can this please be fixed in Jaunty Jackalope?

I've uploaded a candiate package to my PPA of iscan, if someone could test it, I could look at possibly getting this into the archive.

So Michael and I worked together on this this week for a few hours. Unfortunately it's not a pretty story.

ISTM that part of the reason Avasys ships iscan is as a platform for the non-free binaries they provide for the scanners. Unfortunately for us, the binaries seem to go hand in hand with specific versions of iscan. For instance, for my v350 perfection scanner, I can currently only use this pair:

  iscan_2.3.0-2_i386.deb
  iscan-plugin-gt-f700_2.0.0-1_i386.deb

That's what I get when I fill the form out for my scanner model. But if you choose an all-in-one you might get 2.16.0, etc. And from my attempts, my scanner won't work with 2.16.0, and it only half works with 2.15.0 which is what Michael packaged for us.

This either needs to be resolved with Avasys, or we need to do some pretty ugly packaging where each scanner model is supported by one specific iscan package that conflicts with any other one. If any of the bug subscribers here would like to contact Avasys and let them know we're interested in figuring out how to work this through I'd be happy to chip in to the conversation.

I'm willing to contact Avasys on this matter and invite them to support us packaging for Ubuntu. What are the exact questions we would like to ask them? Which devices can we test? When is the deadline for Jackalope so we can steer towords that?

I can test with the Perfection v350 -- but Canonical itself doesn't own
any scanners and can only commit to testing if Avasys arranges some
scanners for us to test with. The deadline for Jaunty is too soon; this
isn't going to make it. However, I'd like to see this problem fixed in
Jaunty+1.

The fundamental thing to ask Avasys is whether or not they can produce a
single release of iscan that supports all the proprietary drivers they
offer. I'd like to understand the rationale for the weirdness there --
is it because they really can't recompile or forward-port the drivers,
or is it just because they haven't gotten around to doing it?

I have an Epson Perfection V10 with which I can test.

Can Ubuntu cross reference its hardware registration database and active Launchpad users to come up with a list of potential testers for hardware like this? Perhaps good to start working on a mechanism like this, or is it normal that Ubuntu has a huge stock of all the hardware it supports?

Pander,

> I have an Epson Perfection V10 with which I can test.
>
> Can Ubuntu cross reference its hardware registration database
> and active Launchpad users to come up with a list of potential
> testers for hardware like this? Perhaps good to start working on
> a mechanism like this, or is it normal that Ubuntu has a huge
> stock of all the hardware it supports?

Asking users if the would be willing to run some tests hardware-related software packages is exactly one of the applications of our hardware database we have in mind :)

Kiko, regarding the problems packaing the proprietary drivers: I know Olaf Meeuwissen, the maintainer of the iscan software, from the Sane developer mailing list as being very responsive to any questions -- simply contact him!

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 07:00:11PM -0000, Abel Deuring wrote:
> Asking users if the would be willing to run some tests hardware-related
> software packages is exactly one of the applications of our hardware
> database we have in mind :)

Cool. How do we do query to see which users have this scanner then?

> Kiko, regarding the problems packaing the proprietary drivers: I know
> Olaf Meeuwissen, the maintainer of the iscan software, from the Sane
> developer mailing list as being very responsive to any questions --
> simply contact him!

Well, if you know him, could you point him to this bug and see if he can
give us some advice?

>> Asking users if the would be willing to run some tests hardware-related
>> software packages is exactly one of the applications of our hardware
>> database we have in mind :)
>
> Cool. How do we do query to see which users have this scanner then?

At present, we don't have the "perfect" solution, but if you are curious, you could start this way, using Launchpad's webservice API. No mechanism to send emails, but you get a list of owners, provided that they have a LP account:

- get the USB vendor and product ID of a scanner (best done right now by looking at the "lsusb" output.)
- get the h_w_device record for this device, by calling

    device = lp.hwdb.devices(bus='USB', vendor_id=0x124, product_id=0x5678)[0]

- get the set of HWDB submissions containing this device:

   submissions = device.getSubmissions()

- Users must specify an email address when they submit their HWDB report; if this address matches a LP user account, the field "owner" of a submission is set to this account.

>> Kiko, regarding the problems packaing the proprietary drivers: I know
>> Olaf Meeuwissen, the maintainer of the iscan software, from the Sane
>> developer mailing list as being very responsive to any questions --
>> simply contact him!
>
> Well, if you know him, could you point him to this bug and see if he can
> give us some advice?

Done

sigh, the "3" key of my keyboard is slightly broken... Also, I forgot the quotes around two parameter values:

device = lp.hwdb.devices(bus='USB', vendor_id='0x1234', product_id='0x5678')[0]

is better. USB IDs must be specfied as hex number, prefixed with '0x'

...to avoid misunderstandings: we don't expose the email addresses

Abel contacted me at work and I promised follow up here on iscan's apparent versioning "mess". I'm doing this from home, in my own time and without my iscan lead developer hat on.

In principle, one should be using the latest version of iscan, irrespective of whatever Epson scanner/all-in-one device one wants to use. According to an announcement[1] on the sane-devel mailing list, that would be iscan-2.16.1 as of writing. Unfortunately, a number of interpreter plugin requiring devices still do not work with iscan versions 2.11.0 and up but these should all run fine with iscan version 2.10.0.

As per same announcement[1], work is underway to fix that for a pile of interpreter plugin requiring devices. Once released, these packages will work with iscan 2.16.1 or later. That same work will also add 64-bit packages and Debian packages for these devices. However, a number of interpreter plugin requiring devices will remain that will only work with iscan 2.10.0. These devices are fairly dated, so there may be very little incentive to update these to work with the latest iscan version, provide 64-bit support and/or Debian packages. People with such devices can (and should?) act to try to increase whatever little incentive there might be. FWIW, the 32-bit interpreter plugin RPMs are easily converted to Debian packages with `alien --scripts` but will still not work with iscan version 2.11.0 or later.

WRT Ubuntu packages, the iscan Debian packages that my employer provides try hard to be distribution independent. Recent developments on the USB scanner configuration front have been a bit of a problem but, IIRC, Ubuntu 7.04, 7.10 and 8.04 should be fine. That means, you should be able to just download the package from the Avasys site and install without any trouble. Just double clicking the icon for the downloaded file is supposed to do the right thing and work.

Ubuntu 8.10 (and by extension Jaunty) were thoughtful enough to provide NO transition window whatsoever :-( for the libltld3 to libltdl7 transition for third party packages, so attempts to install Avasys' binaries will complain about that. You can rebuild your own packages from the source tarball without any changes (unless you want to upload to a PPA, in which case you only have to fiddle with the debian/changelog because Ubuntu doesn't know any 'unstable'). Alternatively, ignoring the libltdl3 dependency (and only that dependency!) when installing and creating a symbolic link is supposed to work as well. See the KNOWN-PROBLEMS file.

So the upshot of all this really is that Ubuntu should only ever provide the latest iscan version. If there are people with devices that are only supported by an older versions or only on i386, bang on Avasys' door. They may not be able to help (whether rightaway or at all) but if you don't even make yourselves heard, how are they supposed to find out?
# Eh, scraping the bug trackers of 15+ distributions is not really an option ;-)

 [1] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/sane-devel/2009-February/023957.html

Hi all, any updates for a debian/ubuntu package regarding iscan?

there is a (broken) debian folder to build a deb in the source code download from the japanese epson site.

i'm trying to build it now.

all I want is the scanner support, so I can use flegita or xsane. is this now GPL?

> Hi all, any updates for a debian/ubuntu package regarding iscan?

I've posted a release announcement[1] to the sane-devel mailing list but the archiving tool seems to have eaten the content :-( Fortunately, there is a follow-up[2] that includes the whole announcement.

 [1] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/sane-devel/2009-March/024207.html
 [2] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/sane-devel/2009-March/024231.html

The site mentioned in the announcement provides packages in .deb format but these will not install cleanly on Ubuntu 8.10 for reasons detailed earlier[3].

 [3] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/208405/comments/14

> there is a (broken) debian folder to build a deb in the source code download from the japanese epson site.

If there is a problem with the included debian folder, report a bug[1], preferably with a clean patch. That Ubuntu's build farm does not know anything about an 'unstable' distribution is Ubuntu's problem as far as I'm concerned.

 [1] https://www.avasys.jp/secure/english/linux_e/support_form.html

> all I want is the scanner support, so I can use flegita or xsane. is this now GPL?

I don't know about flegita or xsane, but iscan is not GPL.
As a whole, iscan is GPL with exceptions and includes (and depends on) a decidedly non-free library. The 'epkowa' backend does not depend on any non-free components but it does include run-time support for their use.

They now provide a 32 bit and 64 bit debian package for iscan and plugins. However I got stuck with this:

# dpkg -i iscan_2.19.2-1_amd64.deb iscan-plugin-gt-s600_2.1.0-2_amd64.deb
Selecting previously deselected package iscan.
(Reading database ... 162025 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking iscan (from iscan_2.19.2-1_amd64.deb) ...
Selecting previously deselected package iscan-plugin-gt-s600.
Unpacking iscan-plugin-gt-s600 (from iscan-plugin-gt-s600_2.1.0-2_amd64.deb) ...
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of iscan:
 iscan depends on libltdl3 (>= 1.5.2-2); however:
  Package libltdl3 is not installed.
dpkg: error processing iscan (--install):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of iscan-plugin-gt-s600:
 iscan-plugin-gt-s600 depends on iscan (>= 2.16.1); however:
  Package iscan is not configured yet.
dpkg: error processing iscan-plugin-gt-s600 (--install):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Errors were encountered while processing:
 iscan
 iscan-plugin-gt-s600

# apt-cache search libltdl
libltdl7 - A system independent dlopen wrapper for GNU libtool
libltdl7-dev - A system independent dlopen wrapper for GNU libtool
libguile-ltdl-1 - Guile's patched version of libtool's libltdl
W: Ignoring Provides line with DepCompareOp for package iscan-interpreter

I installed it with dpkg --force-depends -i .... and in /usr/lib made the following link:
# ln -s libltdl.so.7 libltdl.so.3

Don't know if that link was needed but this procedure enables you to install and use iscan on Ubuntu Jaunty.

Hope this can be packaged soon, the request is more than a year old and now source code and .deb packages for Ubuntu (even for different architectures) are available.

Also note that the latest version does not need the fix udev rules script.

Hmm, the package manager is bugging me about this all the time:

# apt-get upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
You might want to run `apt-get -f install' to correct these.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  iscan: Depends: libltdl3 (>= 1.5.2-2) but it is not installable
E: Unmet dependencies. Try using -f.

How can I tell the package manager to always ignore this, so I can do apt-get upgrade without it wanting to remove it?

Building an empty and fake libltd3 package won't trick apt-get because another package (on which ubuntu-dekstop is depending) is blocking installation of such an old package. Aaaaagh.

What are other ways to have apt-get ignore this missing dependency and allowing apt-get upgrade?

Perhaps someone could rebuild iscan packages with correct dependency on libltdl.so.7 and make them available in a PPA?

Have you considered reading the KNOWN-PROBLEMS file in /usr/share/doc/iscan?

Grab the source tarball and build your own .deb. Instructions are in the README.
FWIW, I said the same thing here[1].

Seeing that Fedora 11 has also dropped libltld3 completely, I'd expect packages built against libltdl7 with one of the upcoming releases.

WRT to the need for running the udev fixing script, this[2] already said that Ubuntu 8.10 and later were not affected.

  [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/208405/comments/14
  [2] http://avasys.jp/hp/page000001300/hpg000001294.htm

The latest packages only work out of the box with root account (not advised). This is something that should be double checked when packaging for Ubuntu.

Have you considered reading the KNOWN-PROBLEMS file in /usr/share/doc/iscan?
In particular the section on: The device is recognised as a scanner but I can't scan.

If memory serves me, Ubuntu uses the same setup as Debian, so you need to be a member of the scanner group. You can check the groups you belong to with the `groups` command.

FTR, the iscan package's postinst (%post for RPMs) works damn hard to get stuff working out-of-the-box according to your distribution's policy. The binary packages, both RPM and .deb, that are released via the AVASYS website are tested on Ubuntu and there is no known problem with scanning as a normal user.

Epson now provides Debian packages for Ubuntu 8.10. Can Ubuntu use these?

Currently they provide also for 9.10 deb packages (32 and 64 bit) and a wider range of their products (including the Perfection V10) are supported. Packages and sources can be downloaded here: http://www.avasys.jp/lx-bin2/linux_e/scan/DL1.do

My question is, can Ubuntu also offer these packages via their repositories since GPL and LGPL licenses apply and source code is also offered?

When Ubuntu is offering these packages, it will be available directly on an Ubuntu release and also be thoroughly tested and integrated.

Note that for normal users on Ubuntu, one have to add the user(s) to the group lp in /etc/groups. A package offered by Ubuntu should fix this one way or the other, otherwise only root can use the device.

I'm currently using Ubuntu 10.04. I recently bought the Epson TX410.
The printer start working after I manually install, from the repository, the gutenprint-locales and the ijsgutenprint. But the scanner didn't, although the "sane-find-scanner -q" did find it, the "scanimage -L" throw me "No scanner were identified".
After several tries (editing sane.d/epson.conf or sane.d/dll.conf, installing other scannig soft, ...) the only thing that made it work was the installing the drivers from here (which comes with iscan):
http://avasys.jp/eng/linux_driver/
Regards.

Please try to get http://www.avasys.jp to contribute to partner repository, like Skype is doing for easy of installation and proving a build at the moment a new version of Ubuntu is coming out.

Could something similar to Brother printer driver downloading which is mentioned in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/brother-cups-wrapper-extra/+bug/727152/comments/3 be offered for Epson scanner drivers too?

Note that the automatic printer driver download service from OpenPrinting is based on the LSB (Linux Standard Base), standard for making distribution-independent binary packages. The manufacturer creates one package per supported architecture and this package works on all distros, he creates RPMs directly and DEBs are made from the RPMs by a bot. For printers we had to add new requirements to the LSB, and for scanners the needed requirements are not (yet) included. We hope that they get in soon. See

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/ProjectPlan42

section "Additions", addition of SANE. Once having SANE supported by the LSB, we need to create appropriate server infrastructure to answer driver download requests (what the OpenPrinting web site does for printers) and Jockey needs to get appropriate code added to do the requests. In addition, an UDEV-based program is needed to do the appropriate D-Bus call to Jockey when a new scanner gets connected.

Any volunteers to help with this work are welcome.

Because many printer manufacturers also make scanners and vice versa and because combined printing/scanning devices exist it is indeed a good idea to use the same download infrastructure.

Epson and AVASYS to Launch First Automatic Printer Driver Download Service for Linux OS
http://global.epson.com/newsroom/2011/news_20110331.html

Any update from side of Ubuntu on this?

iscan, iscan-data and iscan-plugins packages for Ubuntu 10.04 are available at ppa:vhd/newpost - see:
https://launchpad.net/~vhd/+archive/newpost

Maybe we can use debian folder from these packages for packaging new releases? Or maybe debian folder from original packages - http://download.ebz.epson.net/dsc/search/01/search/?OSC=LX is better?

I think a PPA s the best start to get this included in Ubuntu and other distributions. Hopefully Canonical can get a partneragreement with EPSON and Brother for shipping their files directly. See discussion above.

I've found pretty fresh iscan source code at github, see:
git://github.com/hean01/iscan.git
Now I've imported this iscan source code to https://code.launchpad.net/iscan
I'm planing to create packaging recipe to build Ubuntu packages next week ;)

Does this do anything that simple-scan does not? If not, suggest closing out.

It is an alternative from EPSON. for EPSON fan boys and girls, if the software is still actively maintained.

On Thu, 28 Apr 2016, Pander wrote:

> It is an alternative from EPSON. for EPSON fan boys and girls, if the
> software is still actively maintained.

As happens, Iscan did not make my Epson scanner work any better than sane.
The scanner worked fine in 14.04 not in 16.04. I was given an HP about a
month ago which works just fine in simplescan or xsane. Timing is
everything I guess.