Compiling Epkowa

[Oko]

Dear All,

As you probably noticed I have a little time on my hands lately so I was playing with various things. I was trying to compile proprietary Epkowa backends for SANE from SEIKO corporation. As you know Epkowa is a part of disturbing trend that manufacturers are providing Linux only drivers. Hopefully with the rise of OpenSolaris this will end but in the mean time I was playing with it. Epkowa has two parts. One is source code released with GNU license and another is proprietary plug in released only as binary.

Despite reports

http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/FreeBSD/dx5050.html

that at least non-proprietary part could be compiled on FreeBSD my compilation fails miserably. Did anybody try to compile Epkowa on OpenBSD. It would be particularly interested if proprietary plug in could be make useful which will unlock many devices which
are unsupported by sane-backends and many essentially brand new models.

To stay on the same note what are your experiences in trying to install
Linux binaries on OpenBSD?

[luigirizzo]

Hi,
i managed to build and run the sane-epkowa backend for FreeBSD using the source from 2.11.0 -- newer versions of the code seem to have a number of issues (reading config files from the wrong place, linking issues, etc.) which I have not solved yet.
An update port is available as
http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/Free...pkowa-port.tgz
which contains in the Makefile some comments on porting issues.

cheers
luigi

[Oko]

Originally Posted by luigirizzo

Hi,
i managed to build and run the sane-epkowa backend for FreeBSD using the source from 2.11.0 -- newer versions of the code seem to have a number of issues (reading config files from the wrong place, linking issues, etc.) which I have not solved yet.
An update port is available as
http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/Free...pkowa-port.tgz
which contains in the Makefile some comments on porting issues.

cheers
luigi

Thank you so much for your kind post. Were you able to use that proprietary plug in? That is the key for unlocking older devices which are not supported by sane-backends. I have not checked it content too carefully but it seems that it contains firmware which is platform independent (but device dependent of course). Does it contain anything else?
It is too bad that you can not compile newer version as it would essentially unlock the newest Epson scanner models. It is also annoying that they make you download plugin for every specific device instead of
generic plugin. That is another thing which makes me believe that it contains only firmware. New better scanners like V300, V500
should probably need nothing but firmware. V700 is so good (speaks high level language) and over $500 that is already supported by sane-backends.


I tried to get epkowa working via Linux compatibility layer also. Unfortunately package is dependent to 3-4 dynamic libraries and I just lost interest for now as I would have to install CentOS and get the damn libraries. I tried to get them from the net but it is just a painful.
One of missing libraries is libusb (or something like that) which is apparently for USB. I am not even sure that that even can be made to work. I know that CD/DVD devices and audio can work via Linux comp but USB devices are harder nut.

[luigirizzo]

Hi Oko,
i have not tried to use the proprietary plugin, nor i have any device that requires it. Also, i don't have any experience on
OpenBSD

cheers
luigi