[clue-tech] Gentoo discussion was: Distro musings

[Ken MacFerrin]

Collins Richey wrote:
[snip]
> Another disappointing discovery. The Epson CX4200 is an all-in-one,
> and scanner worked out of the box on Ubuntu. Ubuntu has major udev
> rule sets for scanners, but USB scanners seem to have been relegated
> to a "roll your own" project on Gentoo. I've done losts of RTFM but no
> success. sane-find-scanner reports my scanner, but scanimage, xsane,
> and gimp acquire  will not work. Not a critical problem, but still
> disappointing.

There's a few tips listed in these links to get the scanner running:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_EPSON_CX3700_CX3800_CX4200_and_Others
http://atlee.ca/blog/2006/01/10/epson-cx4200/

Mainly looks like it's a matter of adding the right product and vendor
id to /etc/sane.d/epson.conf

> 
> Also, I was bummed out to find the win32codecs is still masked for
> amd64. mplayer is pretty much worthless without that. I'm probably too
> far ahead of the curve running amd64 instead x86.

Looks like only a testing mask for amd64.
http://packages.gentoo.org/search/?sstring=win32codecs

The codecs should install just fine with:
# echo "media-libs/win32codecs ~amd64" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
# emerge win32codecs

You may also need to add "win32codecs" to your USE flag settings and
re-emerge mplayer to build in the codec support.

-Ken