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Installing shared, Windows-based printer in Ubuntu

Sat, 2008-06-28 11:30 — Peter Anderson

I just moved from Vista to Ubuntu (Hardy) and, among other things, have been trying to install a shared Epson printer attached to a WinXP computer.

I found the System > Admin > Printing thing,and although it finds the shared printer, when trying to find the driver, it doesn't list the exact model I have (Epson Stylus CX3900).

I also found this website:  http://www.avasys.jp/lx-bin2/linux_e/spc/DL1.do, but don't know how to install the downloaded file...

BTW, I don't know how to use the Terminal, so would much prefer instructions for the GUI.

Thanks!

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Sun, 2008-06-29 17:15 — Matthew Davidson

Try the CX3805 driver

Openprinting.org says to use the Epson CX3805 driver. It's usually the case that the nearest model number you can find will work, as many models are only superficially different, or a printer/scanner will use the same drivers as the equivalent vintage printer. The files you found seem to add scanning support, but you will probably find this is supported out-of-the-box (actually, I'm not sure if/how scanning works via a samba share).

I can't stress enough how much of a bad idea it is to install software from sources other than your system's package repositories. You should be really, really desperate before you contemplate doing such a thing. You could end up in dependency hell, or with a totally screwed up system. The files on the site you mentioned seem to be RPM's (Red Hat/Fedora/etc. packages), even when you submit the form saying you use Debian. While you can convert RPMs to Debian packages, this is also generally a bad idea.