EPSON Stylus TX105 on Debian Squeeze

Due to general laziness, it took me a long while to research how to make my EPSON Stylus TX105 multifunctional inkjet printer work natively on Linux. I got one of the steps done, arguably only because it was relatively easy to do on a Debian system without messing things up too much — I got the printer piece working on May 2009 with Debian GNU/Linux 5 “Lenny.” Ever since then, I’ve stuck with Windows Vista for scanning and Linux for printing.

This is not the case anymore, now that I’ve learned better. This is one of the many ridiculous things one may need to do when stuck with old hardware that doesn’t work on Linux out-of-the-box. In comparison, I recently installed a Brother HL-2140 laser printer by just plugging the USB cable and waiting for KDE to tell me that the device was configured and ready. Amazing.

So, without further ado, here’s my personal recipe for making the TX105 work natively on Debian GNU/Linux 6 “Squeeze.”

I already linked above a post in which I got the TX105 working on Lenny with some minor package grinding. This should not be required in Debian Squeeze however, so I expect the printer autoconfiguration to do this part for you, at least when running with KDE 4.4.

This is not a trivial procedure since it involves installing software from untrusted third-parties as root — as far as I can tell there’s no trap though, so we may be safe. It seems that AVASYS Corporation develops proprietary (but free of charge) Linux drivers for EPSON hardware in general, amongst other things. While you can get the printer driver from them as well, I’ve not seen any need for it myself yet.

Go through the list at the beginning and select the “Other” option, or just scroll down to the second section yourself and you’ll find some instructions to read and a form to complete, which will lead you to the next page. Find the Epson Stylus NX100/SX100/TX100/TX101/TX105/TX106,Epson ME 300 option in the list and complete the little form below to continue.

In the second page, go to the “Scanner Driver” section around the middle, and pick the .deb data package, and the core package that corresponds to your architecture (x86 or AMD64/Intel64). For the latter, be sure to pick the version labeled “[libltdl7] (for Ubuntu 8.10 or later).” Download.

After downloading, just open a terminal session and change to the directory where you saved your downloads and issue sudo dpkg -i with an additional argument corresponding to the .deb filenames. Make sure to install the data package before the core package to avoid running into an unresolved dependency.

And that’s it. You should now be able to scan and print with your TX105 on Debian Squeeze with your favorite applications. Since the iscan package provides a SANE backend any compatible application such as the GIMP should be able to use it. Alternatively you can try the iscan application itself from the Desktop menu → Graphics section.

Hardware, Software