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Guide – How To Get Epson Perfection V200 Photo Flatbed Scanner Working with Ubuntu 18.04.1

This guide will explain how to get the Epson Perfection V200 Photo flatbed scanner to work with Ubuntu 18.04.1 (64-Bit/AMD64).

Introduction (Unnecessary Story)

A little while ago I bought a flatbed scanner. It’s something I’ve always wanted since I was a young lad, because I was ultimately a strange child. I do a lot of scanning as part of my hobbies relating to archiving documents and print items. For years I have used the scanners built into various all-in-one scanner devices, but a few months ago I got so fed up constantly getting up and down to swap over documents that I said “Enough! I must buy myself a flatbed”. I made my way over to the online car boot that is Facebook Marketplace and performed a few searches. Amazingly enough there are quite a few people selling scanners. Some people wanted insane amounts for really old (like Windows 98 era) flatbeds – but eventually I found someone who had what looked like a reasonably modern model for the small sum of £5. A few days later I turn up and collect the scanner (which included a nice Belkin USB A to B cable) and that’s the end of that.

As part of my move away from Windows 10 as my primary OS to Xubuntu (see this series of posts) – I am trying to see how many of my peripherals work with the operating system. Unfortunately the Epson scanner isn’t as plug and play as my new HP All-in-One printer (which works without any fiddling) but after a few forum posts and learning a little bit on how USB scanners work in Ubuntu I finally got it working.

(If you care, the scanner works without any issue in Windows 10)

Prerequisites

You will need for this process:

An Epson Perfection V200 Photo flatbed scanner with USB A to B cable
A PC or laptop running 64-bit (AMD64) Ubunutu (or a variant) version 18.04.1 (kernel 4.15.0.43-generic)
An internet connection
Root privileges on your device
The Epson Perfection V200 linux drivers downloaded to your PC (from here, or a mirror here)

Process

Extract the tar archive to somewhere on your system (for example in a folder under /home/)
Open up your terminal and change the directory to the folder you have extracted
Run sudo .\install.sh
Allow the script to run
If you open your application menu under Graphics you should now see an item Image Scan! for Linux and GIMP (if not already installed)
In the terminal type sudo nano /etc/sane.d/dll.conf (you can use your preferred text editor if you wish, such as vi)
This now should display a long list of what appear to be manufacturers, move down the list using your keyboard cursor keys to the line epson. Put a # symbol on the lines epson, epson2, epsonds. Then make a new line after #epson and type in epkowa
1. Check that the file matches the following format in the picture below:
Save the changes made to the file and exit
Type in the terminal sudo nano /etc/sane.d/epkowa.conf
Under the section titled # Detect all devices supported by the backend there should be two lines usb and scsi – ensure these are not commented out (by the use of a #) and then close the document
Back at the terminal now type in the command sudo ln -sfr /usr/lib/sane/libsane-epkowa* /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/sane
Now type in sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/55-epson-libsane.rules
You should be in a blank document, copy in the following text:
1. SUBSYSTEM==”usb”, ENV{DEVTYPE}==”usb_device”, MODE==”0666″
  SUBSYSTEM==”usb_device”, MODE==”0666″ATTRS{manufacturer}==”EPSON”, DRIVERS==”usb”, SUBSYSTEMS==”usb”, ATTRS{idVendor}==”04b8″, ATTRS{idProduct}==”*”, MODE=”0666″
  
  ATTRS{idVendor}==”04b8″, ATTRS{idProduct}==”0137″, MODE=”0666″, GROUP=”scanner”, ENV{libsane_matched}=”yes”
Save the file and exit
Now back at the terminal prompt type in sudo cp /etc/udev/rules.d/55-epson-libsane.rules /lib/udev/rules.d/
Disconnect and power off the scanner (best to do this at the wall as I know the V200 goes into a “sleep state” sometimes that looks like it is off). Now reconnect everything and restore the power to the scanner by holding down the power button on the unit.
Now open the Simple Scan application and then open Document and then Preferences
After a short period the Scanner drop-down should populate with Epson Perfection V200. It the drop-down appears Epson then you must check that Epson is commented out of the dll.conf file!
Begin to scan your documents

Explanation

I am in no way a Linux pro. Actually I am very new to the operating system so I won’t be able to explain exactly what is happening in this process like I normally can.

My understanding is that the V200 requires the Epkowa “driver” not any of the Epson named drivers. Although it looks like the system knows its a scanner you will probably end up encountering a communication error if you try to use any other configuration with sane. Sane (Scanner Access Now Easy) is an Linux API for scanners – its man page is here. All we are doing in this process is loading in a different configuration that works with the Epson.

Now the only other scanner I have to use is the HP All in One which I currently have disconnected to avoid any confusion. I would assume these changes won’t have any affect on the operation of the scanner of the HP – I will come back and edit this article if it does. However I cannot guarantee how well this would work if you (for whatever reason) had multiple Epson scanners or other flatbeds.

This document ended up being envisioned as only taking a mere 30 minutes to complete, to multiple hours. Firstly I had done something very silly and not backed up my files before making changes, this mean that although I had got everything working I had no way to see what had changed and what needed to be changed to get it working (avoiding the process including unnecessary steps). After restoring back to a factory sane setup I started over but kept running into the issue where sane would only detect the scanner as an “EPSON” device and not the “Epson Perfection V200”. I also found that a few of the steps I thought were necessary (such as finding the scanner’s ID) didn’t need to be run. With the setup above we simply ask the Epkowa driver to connect and search through all connected scanners to see which one it is compatible with. I would assume that if we had multiple scanners on this system this task may take a while to complete. You could probably override this as the Epkowa.conf file appears to have a section where you can manually specify the product id (you retrieve this information by running sudo sane-find-scanner).

Well I’ve got some scanning to do, I was intending on getting a few other bits done tonight but that looks to have gone out of the window. I will try and keep this article updated as the version of Ubuntu goes along and for as long as I have the scanner. I hope to do more articles that are similar later on in the year, not always for scanners but other USB equipment.

Add More Clip Art in Office 97 (Windows 10)

The Problem

The problem we are trying to fix in this guide is simple, not enough clips! And let’s be honest if you’ve got this far and gone to this much trouble to get Clip Art working under Windows 10 you’ll probably want all the clips you can get, right?

Assumptions/Prerequisites

The following assumptions are being made:

You are using either Windows 10 build 1809 or 1803
The version of Windows you are using is of 64-bit architecture
You have installed Office 97 and selected the Clip Gallery and Popular Clipart options
You have installed Office 97 with one or more applications enabled: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher
At time of installation you left the installation location to its default path of C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office
You have administrative rights over your PC
You have the original Office 97 Standard CD-ROM (or a disc image of the CD-ROM)

The Fix

These instructions should, once completed, change the behaviour of the Clip Gallery in all Microsoft Office programs that support Clip Art. We are simply using Microsoft Word as the default example.

Open File Explorer by launching it from the task bar or by clicking Start and typing This PC
Insert (or mount if using a disc image) the Office 97 Standard CD-ROM. Open the CD-ROM’s contents in Explorer by right clicking the CD-ROM device in This PC and then choosing Open from the context menu.
Open the folder CLIPART. Using your keyboard and mouse, hold SHIFT and then left-click on the first folder (Bullets). While still holding the SHIFT key click on the last folder SCRBEANS.
With these folders selected either press CTRL + C on your keyboard or right-click on a selected folder and choose Copy from the context-menu.
Click on the Local Disk (C:) option from the left-hand pane in Explorer, then drill down the folder structure by opening Program Files (x86) and then Microsoft Office then Clipart. In a white space right-click and choose Paste from the context-menu.
Explorer will then begin to calculate the amount of files it needs to copy. It will identify 80 duplicate files (which are the 79 clips you see already, plus 1 CAG file), choose the option Skip these files.
You will then be asked to give Administrator Permission to complete the copy process. Tick the Do this for all current items checkbox and then click on the Continue button, you may be asked to enter the credentials of an administrator account.
Explorer will now begin to copy the files across from the CD-ROM to your local disk drive. This process may take a few minutes depending on the speed of your hard disk drive and if you are using a CD-ROM or a disc image as the source for the copy.
With the copy completes, open Microsoft Word 97. Open the Clip Gallery by choosing Insert then Picture and finally Clip Art from the menu bar.
Don’t be disappointed, when you open up Clip Gallery it will still only show 79 items. However we now need to import the additional 4,000 clips in. Click on the Import Clips button.
The Add clip art to Clip Gallery dialog box will then appear. Change set the Files of type drop-down to Clip Gallery Packages (should be last in the list) and then click the directory level up button (folder with an arrow pointing upwards) – you should now be in the Clipart folder.
Open the folder OFFICE and select the only CAG file present. Click Open to load the file into Clip Gallery, you should then receive a message confirming the package has been added to the Clip Gallery and that you will need to quit and restart the Clip Gallery to view the new items.
Click OK to dismiss the confirmation message. and then close the Clip Gallery by choosing the Close button. Re-open the Clip Gallery (Insert then Picture and finally Clip Art).
You should now see that you have 2079 clips available under the Clip Art tab. You can add more content by clicking Import Clips and adding the CAG files found in the folders PHOTOS, POWERPNT and SCRBEANS (closing and re-opening Clip Gallery with each action). Under the Pictures tab you should have 144 items. The Sounds and Videos tabs will likely still show 0 items. You can increase this number by importing the CAG file under MMEDIA however you will find at the moment you are unable to preview or insert any of these items.

Summary

If you have followed the above steps you should now have just over 3,000 additional clips in your Clip Gallery. More clips could be added from later versions of Office if they have the .CAG file present, or from third party compilations.

What is nice is that because clip art uses mostly vector technology, the clips can scale to the large HD resolutions that we operate today without corruption or degradation of quality.

Although it is a shame that at the moment I cannot get the audio-clips or video-clips to operate – the 3,000 clips should certainly keep any one keen on a nostalgia trip happy for some time.

Explanation of Fault

Around the time that Office 97 was released, hard disks were still on the small size in comparison to today’s 100’s if not 1000’s of terabytes of storage. For this reason many items of computer software (including video games) would often keep a lot of their media assets (such as graphics, videos and sound files) on the CD-ROM, instead of copying the content to the local hard disk drive. This would mean that for some of these items of software to operate, or for the user to experience the full feature set of an application (such as Microsoft Office) they would need to keep the CD-ROM handy or in their CD-ROM drive during use.

Although when you consider that the content we have copied here only amounts to a measly 86.7 MB (on disk) – this could be considered a serious amount of free space lost for most computer users in 1997.

There really isn’t any further explanation needed as to why Office 97 included (by default) such a small amount of clips – it was simply a design choice to reflect the needs of users at the time.