I have a combined Epson printer/scanner connected to my network, and I want to access that for scanning from my opensuse 12.3 box. The device has been added on this box as a network printer, so I can print to it, but the yast/Scanners tool has failed to detect it as a scanner.
It isn’t connected to a server as such, but wirelessly to my router (the router can see it and has allocated it an IP address). Should I use its IP address as the server name in the scanner config, before attempting to detect it? I assumed the scanner detection would poll the network to see what was available without having to be told which ‘server’ to look at.
I can ping the printer/scanner from my Opensuse box, so the network connection is OK.
Previously I was using debian 6, and I had no bother detecting the device as both network printer and network scanner, so I assuming that my problem is not knowing how to do this in OpenSuse rather than something more serious.
AFAIU, you’ll need to configure by hand for network scanning. You didn’t tell us which Epson model you have. That may have an impact on the SANE backend and exact steps required. The iscan, iscan-data, and iscan-network-nt packages from Epson support a numer of models, with the last package being required for scanning from a network scanner.
Ok, I have installed the packages from Epson (I installed the x64 versions specifically), but now I’m stumped. The Scanner installation tool still doesn’t detect it and the Help page says “Network scanners must be installed manually”.
How is this done?
I know nothing is perfect, but I confess that I am perplexed by all this messing about in a distro as otherwise polished as OpenSuse 12.3. My old Debian 6 rig had no problem detecting the same printer/scanner as both printer and as a scanner, and the device is still sitting there on the network unchanged. My new OpenSuse box has detected and installed the device as a printer, so why all this rigmarole I wonder to detect it as a scanner?
No matter, if someone can help me though ‘manually configuring’ my network scanner I’ll be grateful. Scanning is important in this establishment so I have to have it working.
No matter, if someone can help me though ‘manually configuring’ my network scanner I’ll be grateful. Scanning is important in this establishment so I have to have it working.
TIA
Okay, so can you confirm that you have the iscan, iscan-data, and iscan-network-nt packages installed?
rpm -qa|grep iscan
There are instructions for configuring Epson network scanner by hand:
The printer part is fine - it is the scanner that is the problem.
I believe those are the packages I installed from Epson. However, please see my later post on what happens next. Latest: I have now checked that my /etc/sane.d/net.conf has the address of my scanner (192.168.0.100), and I have restarted to be sure it’s been picked up, but XSane still cannot detect the scanner. What else do I have to do? Is there a help page that spells out the steps to manually set this up?
Have you uncommented the ‘epkowa’ entry in /etc/sane.d/dll.conf?
You may need to explicitly define the IP address of the scanner in /etc/sane.d/epkowa.conf
# Network attached devices may be made to work by first installing the
# (non-free) iscan-network-nt package and then adding configuration lines
# as per information below.
#
# For each network attached device, you must add an entry as follows:
#
# net <IP-address|hostname> [port-number]
#
# Ask your network administrator for the device's IP address or check
# for yourself on the panel (if it has one). The port-number is very
# optional and defaults to 1865.
# Note that network attached devices are not queried unless configured
# in this file.
#
# Examples:
#
#net 192.16.136.2 1865
#net 10.0.0.1
#net scanner.mydomain.com
I think that net.conf relates to the SANE net backend used when communicating over a network to a host with the SANE server.
The iscan application, iscan network plugin and epkowa backend (configured with epkowa.conf) is all that is required to support your network-attached scanner AFAIU.
The manual gave me the tip - I needed to add the scanner IP address in /etc/sane.d/epkowa.conf. Once I’d done that ImageScan tool picked it up, and so does XSane.
Thanks to everyone who helped me on this. As they say, it’s what you don’t know you don’t know that is the problem!
