After some online research, I finally got my Epson Perfection 660 USB flatbed scanner working on Ubuntu and tested it on this circa 1980s photo. For the benefit of any other Epson 660 users out there who want to get the scanner working on Ubuntu, here’s what I did.
First, go to Synaptic Package Manager (System>Admin>Synaptic) and check if you have SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy) installed. Also make sure you have XSANE, the scanning program, installed.
SANE needs access to the Epson 660’s firmware, which should be in the CD that came with your scanner. Copy the file “tail_058.bin” from the CD onto the directory /etc/sane.d. This isn’t as easy as you may think, because you need permission to write to the /etc/sane.d directory.
To do this the easy way, fire up Terminal (Applications>Accessories>Terminal) and type the following:
sudo nautilus
You will be prompted for your password. Enter it. Moments later, the Nautilus file manager will come up. On the file browser, double-click on your Epson CD and locate the file (it’s in twain/data/bin). Select the “tail_058.bin” file and go to Edit>Copy.
Next, double-click on the File System to find the etc folder. Double-click on etc and locate the sane.d folder. Double-click on that, too, and go Edit>Paste.
After that, we have to tell SANE to use the firmware you just copied. To do this, you’ll need to edit the snapscan.conf file in the same directory. To do this, go back to the Terminal and type:
sudo gedit /etc/saned.d/snapscan.conf
In the text editor that comes up, replace the following line:
firmware /path/to/your/firmware/file.bin
with this:
firmware /etc/sane.d/tail_058.bin
Save the file, and you should be ready to scan!
To celebrate the revival of my scanner, I scanned an ancient photo that I found of me working on a Commodore Vic-20. Notice how many obsolete technologies are represented in the photo. 1) A rotary phone; 2) The Vic-20 itself, which had only 3.5K of RAM; 3) The casette tape drive that the home computer used to load (and save) programs and data; and 4) an old TV set that used an analog dial to change the channel, serving as the Vic-20’s monitor.
The photo was rather faded, so I tried retouching it with Gimp, which, despite the valiant efforts of the programmers involved, is sadly still a few generations behind Adobe Photoshop. I even had a hard time saving the file as an GIF that’s optimized for the Web (something I take for granted when using the Save for Web function in PS). Anyway, what you see here is the result of my Gimp experiments.
Anyway, I found a lot of useful information here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-26911.html
The following site has a list of scanners supported by SANE:
http://snapscan.sourceforge.net/
Hope this helps someone out there.
