This video shows how to install an Epson Perfection 4490 series photo scanner in Ubuntu 13.10. You can get your scanner up and running on Linux!
Step 1 ) We use lsub command to list the USB devices. From that, we see the vendor ID of 0x4B8 and the product ID of 0119. We will ensure these are set in the sane.d configuration files.
Step 2 ) We will add our account to the scanner group using usermod -a -G scanner $LOGNAME. Note that it should work without this step.
Step 3 ) We will edit the /etc/sane.d/epson* configuration files to ensure the device ID, product ID, and USB devices are activated.
Step 4) We must logout and log back in for the new group ID change in step 2 to take effect.
Step 5) We go the Epson download website to get the image scan software. We can find the link in the Ubuntu scanner community site.
Step 6) The Epson Image Scan software requires package xsltproc, so we add that with sudo apt-get install xsltproc.
Step 7) In step 7, we tried to run the Image Scan software and got the dreaded "Could not send command to scanner" error that is oft searched for on the forums. We fix that by disconnecting the USB cable and plugging it back in. This is done virtually in the video since I used VMWare Player, but you can just unplug the cable.
