Epson scanner and LMDE7

How to get the Epson Perfection V100 working with LMDE7

Epson used to provide Debian packages for some of their scanners, which otherwise aren't supported by the SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy) project. In particular for the Epson Perfection V100 Photo the following packages were available via the Epson download page. This is no longer the case, the packages have been removed from the official Epson site.

I had my scanner working under LMDE6. After a recent upgrade to LMD7 I noticed that the packages had been removed from my system as part of the upgrade. As I no longer had access to those packages via Epson support, this is what I did:

I mounted my disk where I had a fairly recent system backup via Timeshift. I then chroot'ed ito the root folder of that backup:

sudo chroot /media/michael/backup/timeshift/snapshots/2025-06-05_09-58-36/localhost/

Inside the chroot environment, I checked which packages I needed to recover:

dpkg -l | grep iscan
ii  iscan                 2.30.4-2  amd64  simple, easy to use scanner utility for EPSON scanners
ii  iscan-data            1.39.1-2  all    Image Scan! for Linux data files
ii  iscan-plugin-gt-s600  2.1.3-1   amd64  Image Scan! plugin for the Epson GT-S600 / Epson GT-F650 / Epson Perfection V10 / Epson Perfection V100 PHOTO

I recreated all three required packages by running the following commands:

dpkg-repack iscan
dpkg-repack iscan-data
dpkg-repack iscan-plugin-gt-s600

I then exited the chroot and copied the packages to my Desktop:

cp /media/michael/backup/timeshift/snapshots/2025-06-05_09-58-36/localhost/iscan*.deb ~/Desktop

Now, because the iscan package depended on libsane which has been replaced by libsane1 in Debian 13, I needed to change the control file of the iscanpackage:

mkdir iscan
dpkg-deb -R iscan_2.30.4-2_amd64.deb iscan/
cd iscan
cd DEBIAN

In the DEBIAN directory I edited the control file and changed

Package: iscan
Version: 2.30.4-2
Architecture: amd64
Maintainer: SEIKO EPSON Corporation <linux-printer@epson.jp>
Installed-Size: 1628
Depends: ..., libsane (>= 1.0.11-3), ...

to

Package: iscan
Version: 2.30.4-3
Architecture: amd64
Maintainer: SEIKO EPSON Corporation <linux-printer@epson.jp>
Installed-Size: 1628
Depends: ..., libsane1 (>= 1.0.11-3), ...

That is, I bumped the version number and replaced libsane with libsane1.

Now I could rebuild the package:

fakeroot dpkg-deb -b  iscan/ iscan_2.30.4-3_amd64.deb

and was now able to reinstall everything via:

sudo dpkg -i iscan_2.30.4-3_amd64.deb iscan-data_1.39.1-2_all.deb  iscan-plugin-gt-s600_2.1.3-1_amd64.deb

And voilà, my scanner was working again :-)

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