Saturday, July 18, 2020

Setting up Epson L3101 with Ubuntu 20

With the on and off lockdowns due to coronavirus, business restrictions, and general state of uncertainty around the infection and its impact on individual health, staying inside has become an imperative for for those who can afford to do so.

I got myself a new Epson printer to take out the prints for reading stuff offline in paper mode, as going out for it seemed non essential. Setting this printer turned out to be tricky as I don't have an optical drive with my desktop, and neither on the macbook, so couldn't use the disk that came with it.

While the drivers are generally available on Epson website, getting them to work was tricky on my desktop running Ubuntu 20, because Ubuntu is based on Debian, and Debian seemingly has stopped supporting `lsb-core` and other packages like that.

After trying multiple solutions (which didn't work for me), like:

Finally, what worked was getting the package `lsb-compat` from Debian, and then setting up the driver `epson-inkjet-printer-escpr_1.7.7-1lsb3.2_i386.deb` from Epson site.


In comparison, the process for macbook is much more simpler due to no such dependency being there - simply use the MacOS version to download the correct .dmg file from the driver list.