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Shonky non-standard installer, but it seems to work

Grabbed an Epson CX5500 the other day, as it was on special for about 6x the price of lunch, & it prints & scans & copies.

Next, I had a go at bunging it onto my Mandriva 2008.0-running laptop.

None of the installation packages (named pips) matched the distro version, so I grabbed a .src.rpm to rebuild a matched one. This requested a gazillion or so -devel packages, but did compile... then didn’t produce all of the required RPMs, specifically missing the one which contains the proprietary extensions, I soon discover.

Grumble.

So I plugged it in (is USB). The software manager for it (HAL daemon via D-Bus) chose a driver which looks almost right (one model number away), but which doesn’t quite work: it prints about 6cm of output, gets most of the colours wrong, then powers down(!) the printer & stops (discards the rest of the binary for the printer).

Grumble, grumble.

So I grabbed the “installation” package, to discover that it’s a tar-gzipp’ed shell script, which seems to install the components I apparently need, including the extensions.

It also did some microsurgery to the CUPSd config file, to add a new definition (which is named a few model numbers off). It also did another specific, important thing: it actually works! (-:

The next adventure is to experiment with the scanner drivers (named iscan) which package has file-conflicts with a couple of existing components of SANE. What I’ll probably do is fetch some real source (if any) & integrate the changes with SANE as a patch/update, since there don’t appear to be any wonky proprietary parts to it.

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