Multifunctional Printer, Part I

So, I've got a multifunctional printer. It was part of a special discount offer for the laptop I got last December. That's cool and dandy. Problem: it doesn't provide drivers but for that Other Operating System.

I am extremely lazy so I didn't try to find drivers for using it on Debian lenny until just last night a few days ago. Found some references to a japanese website which provides Linux drivers for quite a lot of EPSON hardware (apparently due to some sort of partnership with the original manufacturer): they provide only 32-bit binaries for the printer component's drivers, and not even for the new Debian stable, and building the source code is pretty useless since I cannot figure out their weird post-installation config procedures, which is part of the auto-installing 32-bit binaries, but isn't documented or (apparently) provided in the source code distro.

Hit the nail with a spanish forum post. I had to install a newer version of the Gutenprint driver (lenny provides 5.0, the post stated 5.2.3 as minimum requirement, which also happens to be the latest provided at SF.net). A simple backport from the unstable (Sid) distribution was sufficient.

# apt-get -b source cups-driver-gutenprint
Printer setup with CUPS

The first hard part was chasing down the generated .debs mixed between the ones from my other simple backport from sid (GIMP 2.6). Okay, not so bad. But then I figured out that the new drivers I was expecting wouldn't appear in foomatic-gui or KDE's printer manager tool (kcmshell printers, although you may know it better for its entry in the Control Center). Uncanny.

Then I figured it would appear in the CUPS config itself.

Next step: scanning with SANE!

Hardware