[sane-devel] Epson Perfection V500 Photo

Ronald F. Guilmette rfg at tristatelogic.com
Fri Nov 4 20:38:06 UTC 2011


In message <87fwi43zbq.fsf at avasys.jp>, 
Olaf Meeuwissen <olaf.meeuwissen at avasys.jp> wrote:

>WRT FreeBSD support, may I suggest you submit a support request[2] so we
>get concrete info on how badly people want this.

I'm not sure that I understand your request.  Could you elaborate?

I mean I want it.  I want it bad.  How bad?  On a scale from one to ten?
Well, you know, I suppose that there are many things in this life that I
want more... youth, good looks, lots of money...

If you are thinking that many other people will suddenly arise from out of
the woodwork to clamor for a FreeBSD port of your driver, once I have formally
done so, well I seriously don't think that's realistic.  It's clear that
FreeBSD doesn't have nearly the market penetration of Linux at this point,
so there is never going to be a numerically huge demand.  But those of us
who use FreeBSD sure would think kindly of your company if you helped us
on on this.

>> Is it really (still) the case that in order to make the V500 work with SANE
>> I have to get some closed-source binary that only runs on Linux?
>
>To the best of my knowledge, yes.  I am not aware of any (successful)
>reverse engineering efforts.

Alright. Thank you much for the information.

>> I'm only asking because the guy who maintains the FreeBSD port of the epkowa
>> backend suggested that I try the epson2 backend, because he felt that it was
>> more up-to-date.
>
>Is that guy talking about the latest iscan release (2.27.1, released on
>2011-09-26)?

I have no idea what specific version he was talking about.  All I know is
that I've now tried both epkowa and epson2 and both are non-functioning for
me in the way I described, i.e. sane-find-scanner sees the scanner while
scanimage does not.


Regards,
rfg


P.S.  If you guys already have the code to make this work, then why not just
do a FreeBSD port and release it as "unsupported"?  I cannot imagine that
doing that would take much work on your part.  I mean it isn't as if Linux
and FreeBSD are such radically different environments.  In fact they are
virtually identially in most respects.  And also, as I understand it, access
to this typr of scanner on FreeBSD is now performed exclusively through a
low-level thing called "libusb" which is presenting some sort of nice clean
API to higher level code that wants to access USB devices.  So if your code
already knows how to interface to libusb on Linux... well... I mean seriously,
how hard would it be to just recompile the stuff for FreeBSD and then just
stick the result on your FTP server under unsupported/ or something like that?

Of course, if you are willing to do this I'll be more than happy to volunteer
to be the guinea pig and test the thing out for you and see if it even works.



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