Getting the Epson Perfection 3940 scanner setup on Linux requires jumping through just enough hoops that even if you have managed it before, it’s easy to forget when it comes time to do it again.

I put this here in the hopes that it will make things easier for someone, (and it’s entirely likely that someone will be me one day :).

  1. Make sure your user is a member of the scanner group, (adduser youruser scanner).
  2. Install xsane, (sudo aptitude install xsane).
  3. Get the firmware. It seems most people grab one of the Suse RPMS of iscan-firmware.
  4. Get the firmware out of the RPM (rpm2cpio iscan-firmware-1.18.0.1-10.i586.rpm | cpio -i --make-directories).
  5. And install it, (sudo install -m 644 usr/share/iscan/esfw52.bin /lib/firmware/)
  6. Edit /etc/sane.d/snapscan.conf and adjust the firmware directive to point to /lib/firmware/esfw52.bin
  7. Profit.