How to setup a Fujitsu Scansnap S1300i on Gentoo Linux

2022-10-20 - My installation notes
Tags: Gentoo linux

Introduction

I just got myself a document scanner in order to digitalise some documents before I lose them for good. The linux setup required some google-fu so here is a report of what I had to do to get it working.

Installation notes

I did not need to change anything to my kernel configuration, that was nice!

I installed the following new packages (the SANE_BACKEND variable should be added to your make.conf):

SANE_BACKENDS="epjitsu"  emerge  media-gfx/sane-backends  media-gfx/simple-scan  -q

Your user should be in the scanner and usb groups:

gpasswd -a <username> scanner
gpasswd -a <username> usb

If you needed to add your user to these groups, you should close your X session and log in again. An alternative would be to run newgrp - in a terminal to make an environment with the correct permissions and then launch your scanning utility with DISPLAY=:0 simple-scan from there.

A fujitsu SANE_BACKEND exists, but it is a trap, you really need the epjitsu one. Simple-scan is a simple gnome application which is very simple to use. I first tried xsane but it was not user friendly at all!

The tricky part

Nothing worked at this stage, the scanner was not detected by neither simple-scan nor scanimage -L, but sane-find-scanner could see it just fine. That is because we are missing a firmware which can be found on the web archive. That’s right you have got to live dangerously in this world of proprietary firmware blobs… Here is the sha1 of the file you should end up with if that can reassure you a bit:

cde2a967d5048ca4301f5c3ad48397dac4a02dad

Download this file then put it as root in /usr/share/sane/epjitsu/:

mkdir -p /usr/share/sane/epjitsu/
mv  /home/julien/Downloads/1300i_0D12.nal  /usr/share/sane/epjitsu/1300i_0D12.nal

If you already plugged your scanner before copying this firmware file, unplug it then plug it again and everything should now work. Just launch simple-scan and enjoy your scanner!