Here follows a quick description of getting an Epson Perfection V300Photo running in Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid.

Firstly, the scanner has sane support but requires a ‘non-free’ (as in speech) driver element.

Thinks you need:

Make sure sane and sane-utils are installed:

sudo apt-get install sane sane-utils

Then you will need to ‘borrow’ libltdl3 from Ubuntu 8.04. You can find it here: http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/libltdl3

And finally, you need iscan and the esci driver as DEB pacakages from AVASYS. You need to go through the form-driven system here: http://www.avasys.jp/lx-bin2/linux_e/scan/DL2.do

Once you’ve installed that little lot, you need to add a line  to one of your sane config files:

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

Add epkowa to the list of drivers found there.

You should now be able to use Xsane or any program which calls Xsane (such as GIMP) for scanning.

I’ll readily admit, it’s a really clunky installation process. It seems largely Epson’s fault. The do provide the Linux driver but it’s a binary and doesn’t appear to be licenced in a way which would enable it to be bundled with a Linux distribution. It would either require Epson to release the sourcecode for their V300 driver or for someone to successfully reverse-engineer the scanner software interface for this to become easier ie: direct sane support.

References:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=6297403
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=978407