This is an information that tends to be forgotten on the Internet, so I’m publishing it here. How to get an Epson Perfection 3490 Photo scanner running under Linux, FreeBSD or whatever. Paths may change on your system, so you may need to adapt the instructions below.

1. Install xsane.

2. Download the Epson firmwares. For the Epson 3490, you need esfw52.bin. You may find this file on Internet, although it tends to disappear. But in any case you can also find this file here.

3. Uncompress the firmwares. That is, sudo tar -Jxvf epson-firmwares.tar.xz -C /usr/local/share/sane.

4. Modify /usr/local/etc/sane.d/snapscan.conf, change the firmware line to point to the esfw52.bin firmware. That is following the commands above, change the firmware line to firmware /usr/local/share/sane/epson-firmwares/esfw52.bin.

If you are running FreeBSD

You should still ensure that you can use the scanner as a normal user.

5.Let’s change the owner of the scanner so that it’s available to users in the saned group. Create /etc/devd/saned.conf and add:

notify 100 {
  match "system" "USB";
  match "subsystem" "INTERFACE";
  match "type" "ATTACH";
  match "cdev" "ugen[0-9].[0-9]";
  match "vendor" "0x04b8";
  match "product" "0x0122";
  action "chown -L cups:saned /dev/$cdev && chmod -L 660 /dev/$cdev";
};

Notice the 0x4b8:0x0122, identifying the scanner USB device which you can get from the lsusb command while the scanner is plugged in.

6.Restart devd with service devd restart.

7.Add yourself to the saned group with sudo pw groupmod saned -m {{your-user}}

8.You may need to log in again so that new group changes are taken into account.