[sane-devel] "epkowa" driver installation on Ubuntu 8.10

[Olav Lavell]

Hello, I noticed that developers of the "epkowa" Epson scanner driver
and Image Scan application are present on this list. So hopefully, my
feedback on their work is not terribly off-topic here.

If not, there's more ;)

(I tried using the forum at
<http://www.avasys.jp/english/linux_e/bbs_scan.html> but it seems one
must have an account to be able to post there, and I see no way to sign
up. Could be my deteriorating eyesight, who knows...)

My problem is I downloaded the deb packages from avasys.jp but
iscan_2.18.0-2_i386.deb would not install (on Ubuntu 8.10) because of an
unresolved dependency libltdl3. The Ubuntu repository offers libltdl7,
which actually does work but is not recognised by the iscan package as
an acceptable alternative. Forcing the install just creates a mess.

I am not much of a developer but I devised this little workaround:

- ln -s /usr/lib/libltdl.so.7 /usr/lib/libltdl.so.3
- Using checkinstall, I created and installed a dummy package named
  libltdl3 (it just copies a text file into /opt).

I guess I could also have made a package that installed the symlink.

Anyway, after this procedure iscan_2.18.0-2_i386.deb installs without a
complaint and the program seems to work just fine.

Perhaps if the problem with the original package can't be solved for
some reason, other people could use the same workaround "solution". I do
hope, of course, that the official package can be fixed.

There is another (minor) issue, but as far as I am aware it could also
be caused by my method of installing the program. Since installing iscan
this way I get the following warning sometimes when I use apt-get:

W: Ignoring Provides line with DepCompareOp for package
iscan-interpreter

I do not know precisely what it means but it doesn't look particularly
harmful. There is no package iscan-interpreter to be found either on
avasys.jp or elsewhere but I guess I don't need it since iscan works
just fine.





-- 
Olav Lavell <olavell at xs4all.nl>