Getting the Epson XP-231 Multifunction printer to work in Fedora 31 KDE spin

This new version of Fedora gave me a bit of a headache trying to get the Epson XP-231 multifunction printer to work.  The main problem was that the OS would not enable the printer and, regardless of my attempts, I could not get the rpm package with the drivers installed.

The Plasma assistant detected the printer, but could not find any drivers.  So, I first tried what has been working before: using a local package called epson-inkjet-printer-201204w-1.0.0-1lsb3.2.x86_64.rpm (which I downloaded and keep around) using either Discover or dnfdragora. Discover told me that the installation was successful, but the Plasma assistant still refused to see the driver.

When I used dnfdragora, it would not start and issue an error message about insufficient permissions. I made my user a sudoer, but it did not help.

Little did I know that the solution was a lot simpler that I expected.

All I had to do was to start dnfdragora and search "epson." This gave me a package with a newer version of the drivers, which I installed and, after that, I simply configured the printer with the plasma assistant, where the drivers could be selected this time.

For the scanner, I used megatotoro's procedure here again.

Now everything is good!

 

Fitting Fedora 29... For not all hats are the same

Yesterday, I wrote a post on how my Fedora 27 reached EOL and I had to upgrade to Fedora 29.  So, I finished the download of the Fedora 29 KDE spin and, after creating a USB live medium, I started the installation expecting two main problems as a result:

1.  A messed-up GRUB2
2.  A fierce battle to get the printer working.  Or the scanner.  Or both, as I have a multifunction Epson XP 231 printer.


I have to say that this time the installer made me confused, in particular regarding the partitioning.  I wanted to keep my home partition and it took me a while to figure out how anaconda does it, but I eventually managed.

The installation was quick after that and I rebooted.

Sure enough, I had problems with GRUB2.  My OpenMandriva-controlled GRUB2 started, but when I selected Fedora, it tried to locate my old Fedora 27 and obviously could not boot.  "No problem," I thought.  "I simply boot OpenMandriva, refresh the GRUB2 configuration, and then boot Fedora."

But my expectation was met: Fedora messed up OpenMandriva and it performed two checks that lasted 1:30 minute each...

After the delay, I used GRUB customizer and could boot Fedora 29  KDE.  The OS was responsive and my personal settings were kept (since I used my old home partition), but one needs to do several things before the fresh install of Fedora becomes completely functional.   Otherwise, you get something very promising, but somehow weird, like Indiana Jones using a top hat.


This post by Mehedi Hasan helped me a lot.  I first installed the updates with su, my root password and then dnf upgrade.  That took a while because there were many packages.


Next, I enabled the RPM Fusion repos.  Again, after su and the root password, I pasted this text on the terminal:

dnf install --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-29.noarch.rpm
dnf install --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-29.noarch.rpm

Next, I installed essential programs:
dnf install vlc
dnf install libreoffice
dnf install wine
dnf install steam
dnf install gimp

The real challenge was to enable the printer and the scanner, as I had predicted.  The printer driver installed without any problem, but I could not enable the printer because of lack of privileges.  I solved that granting my user administration privileges.

The old Fedora 27 drivers for the scanner complained about missing dependencies, so I had to get this iscan bundle.  Then, I remembered that Megatotoro had a post on how to enable the scanner here.  That did the trick.  Thanks, brother!!!


With that, Fedora 29 KDE was in a perfect state for me. Yay!

The Blue Bird Effect: Scanning with an Epson XP 231 multifunction printer on Elive 3

Mamerto Menapace, an Argentinian monk, wrote a story entitled "El Pajaro Azul" ("The Blue Bird").  In this story, a prince gradually falls very sick and no doctor can determine the source of his disease. A hermit is brought from his mountain as the last hope, and this wise man tells everyone that the prince is dying of nostalgia.  To get cured, the prince must start a journey looking for a rare blue bird.

So, the sick prince travels all around the earth, in an futile attempt to find the blue bird and become well again.  However, no person has seen the bird and, defeated, he returns home as an old man only to discover that, among all the other birds that he had in his palace, there was a particularly blue one.     

Well, that same thing just happened to me with my Epson XP-231 multifunction printer and Elive 3.0, the new OS on my laptop.

Elive has been running magnificently; I could not be feeling happier.  Nevertheless, the real test of the OS is to get my printer/scanner to work.

The first part, printing, was not that difficult.  Even thought Elive comes with a convenient utility to add a new printer (the same one I have seen in Mageia 6) in Applications/preferences/print settings, the process of adding the printer gets stuck.  But this problem can be circumvented by opening the browser and typing http://localhost:631/ to go to CUPS.  From there, one can add the printer (once that the iscan bundle with the drivers is installed).

Scanning was, on the other hand, a nightmare.  I read lots of forums and tried many solutions to no avail.  Defeated, I ran another search and found a blog post with a procedure that looked promising.  I tried this last solution and, sure enough, it worked like a charm.

The great irony here was that it was Megatotoro, my own brother, who had posted here the procedure that I needed!  I looked all over the internet and the solution was closer than I had imagined, a complete blue bird effect.

In Elive, one has to basically use SciTE as root to open the files dll.conf (to add the line example-backend), epson.conf, and epson2.conf (to add the values that one gets with the comand sane-find-scanner in Terminology).  In my case, I had to uncomment, in both files, the line usb 0x01aa 0x0001 and modify it to read:

usb 0x04b8 0x1102

That was it.

Now I can both print and scan on Elive 3.0

Something Happened to My OpenMandriva Lx OS

Yesterday I booted my laptop with OpenMandriva Lx and went to look for a book.  When I returned to the machine, a kernel panic was waiting for me on the screen.

Apparently, something went very wrong with the updates that I performed last week, but I did not notice.

This has happened before, though.  As the laptop boots seven OSs (OpenMandriva, Mageia, PCLinuxOS, Pisi, Elive, Fedora, and PicarOS), when I install a system that changes the OMV-controlled GRUB2, OpenMandriva gets a panic.

I do not have the expertise to rectify things other than by performing a re-install.  So, I reinstalled OpenMandriva, updated it (the process did not last more than an hour or so) and, sure enough, the OS was bootable again.

I added my favorite programs in a snap and checked that Steam was working. So was InSync.  Everything was OK.

Then, I remembered the all-in one Epson XP-231 printer.

I located the driver and installed it.  After that, as the printing functions are not normally the problem, but the scanner, I went to set up the latter.  As usual, it was not detected, so I added one from the list and that helped the OS find the scanner and configure it properly.  I tested it and it worked.

As I said before, getting the scanner to work has always been the headache, not printing.  However, this time, the printer would spit illegible code instead of the simple line I typed in LO Writer.

Nothing I tried worked.

Suddenly, I remembered how I managed to get the XP-231 to work in Fedora and Elive... The CUPS approach!

I opened CUPS and added the printer from there.  I chose the driver, checked the settings, and asked it to print a test page.

This time, I saw Tux come out from the printer, smiling on the page.

 ********************
If I had remembered before, I could have saved some time.  But, truly, since nothing had failed in so long, I have already started to forget what to do if one of my OSs misbehaves.

I am getting rusty.

Maybe it is time for me to start experimenting with BSD, Haiku, or something.

Progress Report

This table shows my progress working with several problems on my four main Linux distros.

After a lot of effort, I made significant progress with the Epson XP 231 in PCLinuxOS.  Today, I managed to get it to work as it should.  Some people are reporting my same problem with Steam on that OS, though...

OpenMandriva Lx 3.1 pretty much does everything, except that Insync, which I believed was running, must be reinstalled every time to get it to work. You close the session and it's gone.  Bad.

Mageia 5.1's problem is the scanner.  XSane reports that the usb port where it is found fails to open the device.  I originally thought it was the file epwoka.conf at /etc/sane.d, but it does not seem to be the problem.

And then Fedora 25 weirdly refuses to print, but I suspect it is because I installed Fedora two days ago and noob is too short a word to describe me.

But I will keep trying.  At least, I could solve the printing/scanning problem in PCLinuxOS by using what I learned in Fedora about the installation of packages via shell.

UPDATE: I finally solved the problems with the printer on Fedora 25 and installed Steam.  Hence, Fedora is so far the first system in which I managed to get everything running.

Random Musings on the New Year and Changes

Change has always been viewed as an alteration.  For those who cherish the status quo, this alteration is a great source of anxiety, a life-disrupting experience that epitomizes the full meaning of the word problem.  Those who are dissatisfied with the current state of events, however, embrace change and preach that it is an opportunity to reach new heights, an open road leading to unknown happiness and fulfillment.

I suspect that we human beings have a misconception of change.  We tend to see it as something unexpected, an unforeseeable collision in our otherwise peaceful existence that forces us to adapt or succumb.  This is wrong; change is happening constantly around us: it is the normal condition of the universe.  We cling to the illusion of permanence and choose to reduce change to something that occurs randomly or periodically, as with the end of a year.

With the dying of my reliable Epson Stylus TX-200 printer, I was slapped by a

Epson Stylus TX 200

situation long-forgotten: Linux-compatible hardware is sometimes difficult to find.  My all-in-one printer had been with me almost since I migrated to Linux in 2009 and never did I think about what kind of replacement I had to get if it happened to fail.

True, replacing a printer is not a catastrophe, much less when the loyal device malfunctioned during vacation time, exactly two weeks after the work-related pressure had already dissipated.  So, after checking the availability of Linux drivers, I bought an Epson XP 231 as the successor of the venerable TX-200. Drunk with the wine of naivety, I expected the road to configure this new printer to be a smooth path.

Epson XP 231

I stumbled at each step.  While I can print in two of the three main distros that I regularly use, I had to battle and managed to get the scanner to work in one, OpenMandriva Lx 3.1.  No success in Mageia 5 or PCLinuxOS yet.

Although the printer tossed me into a tar pit, this post is not about printers, but about change... And change is happening, placing me in a position to make decisions on matters I had either postponed or refused to consider.  For instance, Mageia will have to release its 6th iteration one day, and this new version will feature Plasma 5, which I do not particularly like because it removed a feature that I grew to love: the ability to have different wallpapers on each workspace.  No, KDE developers, "ACTIVITIES" DO NOT FULFILL THE SAME PURPOSE!

Come Mageia 6 and I will have to wave farewell to KDE 4.  OpenMandriva has been training me on the ways of Plasma 5, so I will only have to forget about the wallpapers, just like I had to forget about GRUB when GRUB 2 came along.  Who knows, maybe a new secret feature of Plasma 5 will make me love the DE, just like when I grew to love the ROSA SimpleWelcome screen in Mandriva 2011...

Mageia 6 Sta1 has been on my laptop since September (for testing).  When Mageia 6 is finally released, I will have an additional partition on my HD if I replace my current Mageia 5 install.

Maybe, with 2017 knocking on the door, it is time to get a Fedora?

Those Meaningful Gifts... Thanks, OpenMandriva!!

Yesterday, I read an email coming from the mail list of OpenMandriva.  It was an announcement about an unexpected release: The community had been working on a surprise and released OpenMandriva Lx 3.01 as a Christmas gift.

News of the kind always stirs some excitement in me. How can I forget that it was Mandriva the distro that made me fully commit to Linux in 2009?

This time was a bit different, however.  Do not get me wrong; my interest in OpenMandriva has not waned over the years despite the fact that I also use Mageia 5 and PCLinuxOS daily for my computing needs.  What happened is that, exactly one week ago, my EPSON Stylus TX 200 all-in-one printer died and I had been on the market trying to find a good replacement.

I eventually bought an EPSON XP-231 because it is advertised to have full Linux support but, so far, I have not managed to get it to work properly in Mageia (scanner problems) and PCLinuxOS (both printer and scanner problems) because of the drivers.  Therefore, my investment on the new hardware was beginning to look like a relatively expensive mistake.

Then OpenMandriva Lx 3.01 came and saved the day.

The XP-231 was not easy to get to work, to be honest, but I eventually got it to print and scan appropriately in OpenMandriva Lx 3.01.

Oh, and I must add that this release also corrected a bug that prevented me to run Insync, a program that I became fond of.

All I can say is that I am thankful for the hard work of the folks at OpenMandriva, who gave me this wrappingless Christmas gift...

And wrappingless gifts, I have learned, tend to be the most meaningful ones! 

My Desktop Linux Distros and the Epson Stylus TX200 Printer

I remember that the only thing withholding my complete migration to Linux was the lack of a printer that worked with Mandriva 2010.  Back then, I had a Canon iP1000 and had to use Windows XP every time I needed to print something.

Then, the ink cartridges got real expensive and I got fed up.  I ended up buying an Epson Stylus TX200 all-in-one that Mandriva 2010 would pick up without major issues.

When Mageia 1 was released, I continued using the printer/copier/scanner happily.  However, as Mageia turned 2, I discovered that the drivers for the TX200 scanner were there, but the printer was not operational.

I tracked down the missing drivers and installed them manually.  End of the problem.

With Mandriva 2011 I never had problems with the printer.  Unfortunately, the computer would become so slow that using it was becoming reminiscent of Windows and I had to remove this distro from my computer. 

Mageia 3, oddly, activated the printer without any hassle... but the scanner was a different story.  I again installed the drivers manually to no avail.  After a battle of an hour, the system would not see the scanner and I gave up. 

The following thing I knew was that Mageia 3 detected the same scanner twice.  Fine with me as long as it worked, really.  And it did.

With OpenMandriva Lx 2013 I was not that lucky: the scanner works, but I could never managed to get a printed line from the printer.

Today, I remembered that I had not configured the printer for PCLinuxOS, which also shares a partition on my desktop computer.  Without knowing what to expect, I went to to the PCLOS control center/Hardware/Configure printers and saw that the only thing there was a CUPS printer.  I turned the Stylus on with some anxiety.

A printer icon appeared immediately on the notification area.  Before I could click on it, the Stylus TX200 printer had been added to the available printers in the control center.

In disbelief, I printed a text page, which came out perfect.

I went to configure scanner and PCLOS detected the Stylus TX200 in less than 3 seconds.

So, by far, PCLinuxOS was the distro that picked up the printer faster and more easily for a non-technical user like me.  I mean, had I been using Windows, I would have had to install the drivers.  That implies placing the DVD on the tray, following the instructions on the screen and rebooting.  With PCLinuxOS, it was a matter of turning the printer on (to get the printer working) and clicking once (to enable the scanner).

And some people out there still claim that Linux is more complicated than Windows!