How I Got My Epson XP-231 to Scan Using Xsane

Mechatotoro gave me a printer Epson XP-231, which also has a scanning function.  After installing the drivers and seeing it print text files and scanned pages, I thought I had it up and running well... until I tried to scan a page to save it as an image:  it would not start the software to scan that came with the drivers.

I tried simplescan and learned that it didn't recognize my scanner.  It saw just the camera.

Then, I tried Xsane.  Same problem.

After a few hours of trying, I stumbled upon VueScan.  I downloaded the trial and BINGO!!!  It worked like a charm.

I was inclined to pay, but realized that the basic version only used the scanner to its minimum.  To get it to work fully, you have to pay a bit more.  Maybe too much for my budget.

Thus, I set forth on a quest to make the scanner work because, unfortunately, Mechatotoro's method did not work in my case: He was using Red Hat based distros and I use Debian based ones.

Thanks to this fine tutorial, I could solve the problem. This is how I got it:



As root, I opened the file:

/etc/sane.d/dll.conf

Depending on the case, you have to uncomment or add : example-backend

I noticed that there was a line reading epson2, and it was uncommented.

Then, I ran on the CLI:

sane-find-scanner

The output looked like this:

# sane-find-scanner will now attempt to detect your scanner. If the
  # result is different from what you expected, first make sure your
  # scanner is powered up and properly connected to your computer.

  # No SCSI scanners found. If you expected something different, make sure that
  # you have loaded a kernel SCSI driver for your SCSI adapter.

found USB scanner (vendor=0x01aa [EXAMPLE], product=0x0001 [EXAMPLE SCANNER]) at libusb:001:003

  # Your USB scanner was (probably) detected. It may or may not be supported by
  # SANE. Try scanimage -L and read the backend's manpage.

  # Not checking for parallel port scanners.

  # Most Scanners connected to the parallel port or other proprietary ports
  # can't be detected by this program.

The line "Found USB scanner (vendor=0x01aa [EXAMPLE], product=0x0001 [EXAMPLE SCANNER]) at libusb:001:003" is the important one here.  I copied it somewhere else to have it ready.

As root, I opened

/etc/sane.d/epson.conf

and

 /etc/sane.d/epson2.conf

I looked for the line reading "usb" in both files.  I added in both, as root,  the information of the vendor and of the product I got as my output.  Using the example above, it looked like this:

usb 0x01aa 0x0001

After saving those files, all I had to do was starting Xsane.  Now it recognized my scanner!  :D