Using an Epson Perfection 1650 scanner on Fedora 18 Linux

I've just installed Fedora 18 and been trying to figure out why my Epson Perfection 1650 scanner won't work.  It is about 10 years old but works like a champ.

Upon buying a Windows 7 machine last year, I had to install VueScan (see http://www.hamrick.com), since Windoze no longer supports older hardware.    I forked over a few bucks but it worked great and I didn't have to buy a new scanner.

So, now I install Fedora 18 and I'm trying to figure out what to do.  I install the XSane scanning package (and several others), but none of them work (they all appear to use the same libraries).  They all think my scanner is an "Epson GT-8200" or something, and any scan/preview dies after about a second of activity.

I googled around and eventually found a recent blog posting here:

http://klausboon.wordpress.com/2013/04/11/sane-config-for-my-epson-scanner/

which has the simple answer!  Here is a cut/paste of the relevant blog entry in case it ever goes away:

Sane Config for my Epson Scanner

April 11, 2013

Recently I tried to scan some paperwork with my Epson Perfection 1650 in Fedora 18. But my scanner did not work as expected.

When using the Simple Scan Application in Gnome 3 (3.6.3) the Scanner growls for a second and stops immediately after. After some study about the Sane backend – responsible for scanner-operation – I found this solution for the problem:

Open the Sane config file as root

I personally use vi as editor and sudo for getting root privileges.

sudo vi /etc/sane.d/dll.conf

Somewhere in the middle of this file you will find two consecutive lines: one that reads #epson and the other epson2. So this means that the epson2-driver is used – but unfortunately the  Epson Perfection 1650 needs the epson-driver to work correctly.

So change the 2 above described lines to this configuration:

epson
#epson2

Unplug and plug in your scanner again…. and it hopefully works for you.

So, that's all you need to do!  It worked beautifully for me.

Good luck!

P.S.  I also noticed that VueScan has a version of their software that works on Linux, which might be usefull.