[sane-devel] Epson Perfection 3170 on 64 bit

[Johannes Meixner]

Hello,

On Apr 16 23:12 Ingo Müller wrote (shortened):
> I just got a response from Epson. The Perfection 3170 driver for Linux
> is not maintained anymore. There is no 64bit version, neither are their
> plans for one. The suggested solution is to set up a 32bit environment
> inside the 64bit system and use the 32bit drivers. What a shame...

I don't know what exactly is meant by "set up a 32bit environment
inside the 64bit system" but as far as I know you only need to
install the scanning related software as 32-bit packages, i.e.
a scanning user frontend like XSane as 32-bit package together
with 32-bit packages for the SANE base software (i.e. packages
like sane-backends and so on). Then it should work to download
and install the 32-bit packages from Epson Avasys.


Reasoning:

1.
A scanning frontend links with the SANE library libsane.so
which is in fact the dll pseudo-driver.

2.
The dll pseudo-driver dlopen()s the other drivers which
is here the epkowa driver.

3.
In this particular case the epkowa driver needs a proprietary
32-bit-only library to operate the scanner.

Therefore on a 64-bit system:
If one runs a 64-bit scanning frontend (e.g. the 64-bit
version of scanimage or xsane) then it links with
the 64-bit version of libsane.so.1 which again wants to
link with the 64-bit version of the epkowa driver
which would fail if only the 32-bit Iscan package
from Epson Avasys is installed but would wotk if the
64-bit Iscan package from Epson Avasys is installed.
In the latter case the 64-bit epkowa driver wants
to link with a 64-bit version of a proprietary driver
library from Epson Avasys but this would finally fails
because there is only a 32-bit version of these library.

In contrast on a 32-bit system:
If one runs a 32-bit scanning frontend (e.g. the 32-bit
versions of scanimage or xsane) then it links with
the 32-bit version of libsane.so.1 which again links with the
32-bit version of the epkowa driver which then can link with
the 32-bit version of the proprietary library so that
your scanner works.

Summary:
It should work if one installs on a 64-bit system the full
scanning software only as 32-bit software but I never tested
this on my own because I do not test scanners which need
proprietary software stuff.


By the way:
An installed 32-bit version of XSane might require a 32-bit version
of Gimp (which would require lots of other 32-bit libraries)
when the XSane Gimp-plugin should be used to acquire an
image from the scanner directly from within Gimp.



Kind Regards
Johannes Meixner
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