Yet another round of fun with USB under Fedora Core 3. This time, I brought home an Epson Stylus CX6600 printer/scanner/copier.

The printer part of it was easy to set up with the Printing system settings. There is no driver for the CX6600 yet, but the CX6400 driver works just fine.

Before I was able to use the scanner, I had to fix the usual permissioning problem, because only root has access to the scanner by default. Following the ideas in Karl Heinz Kremer's SANE Epson HowTo, I added the following line in /etc/hotplug/usb/libsane.usermap, which is part of the sane-backends RPM:

libusbscanner 0x0003 0x04b8 0x0813 \
  0x0000 0x0000 0x00 0x00 0x00 \
  0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00000000

This has to be entered as one line without the backslashes. The second and third hexadecimal numbers can be found by running lsusb, the 0x0003 at the start and the zeros at the end are identical for all device entries.

With this line, hotplug invokes the script /etc/hotplug/usb/libusbscanner whenever the Epson CX6600 is connected or disconnected, and gives the currently logged-in user access to the USB device.

This would already be enough for using the scanner with the excellent VueScan. If you want to use it with SANE, you'll have to add the following line in /etc/sane.d/epson.conf:

usb 0x04b8 0x0813

Before doing this, you can run sane-find-scanner to check if your version of SANE detects the scanner. Afterwards, scanimage -L should list an "Epson Unknown model flatbed scanner".