Epson Stylus CX7800 and Gutenprint
January 27, 2006 – 2:00 pmWe ordered a new color printer for our lab earlier this week, and it arrived yesterday morning. It is an Epson Stylus CX7800, an all-in-one photo copier, scanner, and printer. As with any new printer, my first concern was if (and how) I could get this printer to work with all of our Linux machines.
Our lab has seven Linux workstations (each running either Fedora Core 3 or Fedora Core 4), and we have one Dell laptop running Windows. Two people in the lab bring their Apple laptops in daily (one is a 12″ Powerbook, the other a 12″ iBook). The dream is to have this printer work with all of these machines.
Add in the complexity that we want to network this printer via the D-Link DP-301U USB print server, and I was not entirely confident we would succeed. The reason I had some confidence with the Linux boxes was because of the success I had using the DP-301U print server previously, where I networked an Epson Stylus C84 that we could use on all of the lab’s Linux machines.
This time, though, I was not so lucky because I could not find a driver for the Epson Stylus CX7800 via the gimp-print-cups package. After a little checking, I found that I was using the most recent RPM of this package for Fedora. It was looking like I was hosed, not having a working driver for our new printer.
Fortunately, I quickly came across Gutenprint, which is the new name for the software that was formerly known as the Gimp Print Plugin, which I had previously installed via the package gimp-print-cups. Gutenprint is still in beta, and I could not find a Gutenprint RPM. So, I had to resort to downloading gutenprint-5.0.0-rc2.tar.bz2 from the Gutenprint website and install the package from source.
It turns out that I needed a few RPMS that I didn’t have installed. Specifically, I needed cups-devel, libtiff-devel, libjpeg-devel, and libpng-devel, in addition to the already installed cups, libtiff, libjpeg, and libpng packages. After installing those missing packages, running the command ./configure --with-cups, followed by the well known make and make install got me set up with all of the new drivers. I then did a /sbin/service cups restart to make CUPS aware of the new drivers, and the rest was history.
I followed the same steps I outlined in my previous post about using the DP-301U print server in configuring the new printer, and I was able to choose the correct EPSON Stylus CX7800 - CUPS+Gutenprint v5.0.0-rc2 driver from the CUPS web interface. Since making these changes throughout the lab, I have been able to remotely print to our new color printer from all the Linux machines. Life is good.
7 Responses to “Epson Stylus CX7800 and Gutenprint”
I do appreciate you posting this, it was rather helpful for me in setting up a Canon CP-200
By Rodney on Feb 5, 2006 at 11:20 am
Great! I’m very happy to hear that.
By jjk on Feb 5, 2006 at 11:31 am
This posting is ‘exactly’ what I’m looking for. I’m trying to set up a Epson Stylus CX7800 and a D-Link DP301U. Thanks very much! Works great!
Bill J
By Bill Jones on Feb 11, 2006 at 5:11 am
I’m very glad you found it helpful. Thanks for letting me know.
By jjk on Feb 11, 2006 at 1:19 pm
Thank you for sharing your info. Were you ever able to get the Macs printing to the printer via the DP-310U. I have an HP 6210 All-in-one printer that I am trying to print to using my 17″ powerbook via a DP-301U. D-link told me that the DP-301U did not support all-in-ones but that some people used some third party drivers and got it working. Any idea on that?
By Nathan Veer on Mar 16, 2006 at 8:14 am
We were able to get the Macs to print with the DP-301U. It was much like the Linux setup, since Macs use CUPS as well.
The DP-301U does “support” all-in-ones in the sense that it doesn’t really matter what you plug into it. Your problem is finding a driver for the device, which you would still have if you were connecting the device to your computer via a cable.
So, yes, you should be able to get it to work with the Macs. If you know what’s happening step-by-step with the Linux instructions, the Mac setup should be very similar.
Let me know if you run into problems.
By jjk on Mar 16, 2006 at 9:01 am
Update Oct 2007:
Installed Kubuntu 7.10 & updated it. Plugged in wrong USB cable expecting to access USB HDD, instead got a “found Epson CX7800″ dialog. First run of printer management GUI found it, installed it on first try. Print quality is better than using Windiz XP.
SANE has a scanner driver for it. Driver is from Avasys, owned by Epson, driver name is Epkowa.
sane.org
avasys.jp
By Eric Lee Elliott on Dec 20, 2007 at 11:37 am