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.

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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.