[sclug] Epson D88 printer

[Neil Haughton]

Y'all may be interested to hear my experiences with a new Epson Stylus 
printer.

After a lot of research I ordered a Stylus C86 printer from 
TechShop.co.uk (in Acton, actually). It arrived overnight (good) but 
they delivered a D88 instead of a C86. Unfortunately as far as I could 
tell from googling etc, no-one has got the D88 to work with Linux, and 
the printer compatibility databases don't mention it. Arrggg!

In a quandary, and expecting a fight, I emailed them to point out the 
error, but of course it's Friday and they're closed until Monday. It's a 
horrible feeling, isn't it, when something new arrives and it's the 
wrong thing and you have to WAIT to change it?

Anyway, I googled some more and found a bit of kit (the Epson Stylus 
Photo Printing System or something like that)  that claimed to provide 
Linux drivers specifally for the D88, so I downloaded it and rpm'd it 
into place, restarted CUPS and followed the instructions to install the 
printer. No go. Nothing came out in the way of characters on paper. It 
looks like the output was going to wrong place, but I couldn't make head 
nor tail of it (and by now I was dying for a beer anyway.) Here we go 
again, I thought, another driver battle and smug looks from my Windows 
friends (one of whom I'm married to).

Then in a flash of inspiration (or desperation, perhaps) I decided to 
try a 'standard' driver, and at random picked the C80 (well, C80, D88, 
they both have an 8, don't they?). To my utter astonishment the printer 
worked perfectly. I can even get 720dpi resolution, select photo-paper 
if I want - everything!

Well not everything - it won't tell me the ink level, and it won't make 
the tea. But it does produce pretty good results.

So it appears that the idea that Epsom inkjets generally appear to work 
with Linux without fuss is generally correct. Worth remembering.

Neil.