Printer support?

I tend to go for programs first, then choose the OS to suit the software I want to run. Ageing hardware may be more suited to Linux, I agree.

It certainly has support for network-connected printers. It automatically found my HP Laserjet 283 (once I'd told it I was connected by LAN rather than USB) and even found the correct driver for ir. You should be OK with an Epson printer.

This is using Raspbian on a Pi3 and a Pi4. Is there a list within Raspbian (and other flavours of Unix) of the printers that are supported? I suppose there must be for CUPS (printing service) to offer a drop-down list of printers when you set one up manually if the auto-detection fails.

"works perfectly"

On 11/03/2022 16:32, The Natural Philosopher wrote: >

Thank-you both gentlemen.

As it happens, I was on the verge recently of unpacking the RPi400 that I got last June 2021, and had cleared a space for it, when unexpectedly an Eddystone EA12 communications receiver became available just for the asking and it is now sitting in that cleared space whilst I find somewhere else to put it! :-)

(I am a Radio Ham in addition to other interests)

I have been studying the ARMv8 instruction set, off and on, for some months now in anticipation of an assembly language project that had its genesis nearly 50 years ago when working for the CEGB in Portishead

Its worth knowing that the Epson and HP printer ranges have always remained backward compatible: as new printers have got new features, the codes needed to use them were simply added to the command set and ,AFAIK, nothing was ever removed, so a program written for say, an Epson MX80 (9- pin dot matrix) will print correctly if any more recent Epson printer is used instead of the original or the program, which might have been written in an old 4GL, such as dBase or Sculptor, is being being run on a more modern computer with a modern printer.

If it supports PostScript or PCL, it almost certainly will be picked up by CUPS, possibly with as little needed as a .ppd file. Some printers use other control languages and will need some sort of filter; I have an Epson ET-3760 that falls into this category. I haven't tried setting up a Raspberry Pi to print to it, but I have a workstation running Gentoo Linux that talks to it with no trouble. Since you can also run Gentoo on a Raspberry Pi nowadays, I'm reasonably confident in saying that's at least one way I could get it working.

(The driver I'm using appears to have binary blobs within the downloaded archive: one each for x86, amd64, armhf, and aarch64...another hopeful sign for getting it working.)

Quoting from that page...

Epson WF-2510 Series Color inkjet printer, max. 5760x1440 dpi, works Perfectly Recommended Driver: epson-201211w (Home page, Driver packages: x86 32 bit: 1.0.0 (RPM for LSB 3.2) (Signed), 1.0.0 (DEB for LSB 3.2) (Signed), x86 64 bit: 1.0.0 (RPM for LSB 3.2) (Signed), 1.0.0 (DEB for LSB 3.2) (Signed) (How to install))

The recommended drivers are epson provided and x86 32/64 bit. It doesn't mention arm versions.

Don't thank me too soon. I note that is *86 only, and does not include an ARM binary, or source.

HOWEVER when you install CUPS you may find that there is a close alternative, or ot may be that the *86 package includes a PPD file, which is a text level description of yet printer capabilities and commands to invoke them.

In general to access a network printer you need tow elements to be defined - the actual network level protocol, and a CUPS PPD file.

Most printers will respond to the HP jet direct protocol on port 9000. And most printers have an inbuilt web server that you can access to set up protocols and IP addresses and so on.

The best thing with linux is to switch everything smart off, set the printer on a fixed IP address and use ONE protocol. 'Raw socket or IPP ' is a good one.

Then use the standard printer install dialogue and tell CUPS/LINUX that the printer is on that IP address using that protocol. CUPS will then give you the chance to select what the printer is from a list. Pick the neatest epson you can find, install it, and then edit the installed PPD file if there are more features you want to enable.

Oh, look what I found..

A full PPD for that printer.

Unfortunately you still need a 'CUPS FILTER' file and that us *86 binary.

Hmm. THAT may well be available too.

$ sudo dpkg -i epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2_1.1.24_armhf.deb

etc...

Look I don't have time to delve further, but with a filter and a PPD you should be there,

Yes, my bad, I forgot it was a Pi, but the PPD file is available as a text file and it looks like the CUPS filter file exists too as an ARM binary .deb package.

See my earlier post.

And if I need to give anything a static IP address, I use the "reserved address" feature of most modern routers (when a device with a given MAC address requests an IP, always give it this one) rather than setting it as static IP at the printer etc. This means that if I temporarily connect the printer to a different network, I won't run the risk of a) an IP in the wrong subnet => no communication, or b) an IP which conflicts with one that the different network's router is quite correctly handing out to something else => neither device will work.

I often thought about that but, having grown up with static IP addresses know how to do that easily enough, I have a reserved range for them set up in the router.

I can remember the days before DHCP when every computer on a network had to be given a unique IP address by configuring a static IP on that computer. And if you wanted to communicate with another using its name, you needed a hosts file with a list of IPs and corresponding names. At work, each floor of the building was given its own subnet - so floor 1 was 123.234.1.x, floor

2 was 123.234.2.x, etc (fictitious figures), and someone on each floor maintained the master hosts file for the floor. When a new computer was added, everyone who wanted to use it had to update their own hosts file with the master one. There was a great temptation, if you needed to add a computer temporarily and the hosts file owner was busy, to choose an address in the same subnet that did not appear in the list - only to discover that someone else had done the same thing and had already nabbed that address.

DHCP (and an associated DNS for name-to-address mapping) was a great step forward, though there were problems if you needed to access a computer for some traffic that didn't use DNS (eg a computer running a web server, or a printer), and those *were* configured with static IPs, using a part of the subnet which was not in the DHCP scope, as you say.

Now that most routers can reserve IP addresses, I leave all computers set to use DHCP, but I reserve specific addresses for certain devices. Security cameras are in one range, because I need a fixed IP for those so I can set up port-forwarding rules in the router (forward 123.234.1.30:81 ->

192.168.1.3:80, 123.234.1.30:82 -> 192.168.1.4:80, 123.234.1.30:83 -> 192.168.1.5:80 etc, where 123.234.1.30 is the WAN address - which may change, so DDNS is needed to map mydomain.com to the current WAN address that the ISP has allocated). PCs go in another range, tablets/phones in another. No need for a lot of that, but it keeps thing organised!

I've been bitten too many times with IP address clashes to use static IP (configured at the computer) unless there is no alternative. About the only time I've needed to set a static IP is when configuring a device such as a security camera which comes pre-configured to use 192.168.10.1, when my router uses 192.168.1.x, so I need to find spare network switch, connect just the camera and my PC (which I give a static IP 192.168.10.2), access the camera's web interface to change its IP to "use DHCP", likewise for my PC, and then connect everything back to the router. Tedious, but there's no way round it.

Am 11.03.2022 um 15:21 schrieb gareth evans:

I own exactly this printer and have no problems.

FW

On a sunny day (Mon, 14 Mar 2022 09:49:06 -0000) it happened "NY" snipped-for-privacy@privacy.invalid wrote in <t0n33i$37h$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

FYI I only use static IP adresses on my local network. Killing dhcpd is in my start up scripts, that stuff is s nuisance.

Just imagine everybody's phone number changing al the time.... :-)

I have many scripts that send data to other computers (raspis, light controllor, servers, what not) some even use netcat. Why make things complicated that can be done simple.

Me too. Ethernet wired machines configured with a fixed IP, or for mobile wireless devices I configure my dhcp server to server them up a fixed IP address. There is a use for dhcp :-)

Indeed

I agree with giving some computers reserved addresses if you may need to access them by IP rather than by computer name because the name service won't resolve for all types of computer than may need to access them. Windows PCs seem to be able to access by name even after a router is rebooted and/or its DNS cache is cleared. But other operating systems such as Android and iPad often can't resolve by name so if I need to access an HTTP web interface for software on my Pis, I usually configure everything to use http://128.168.1.x:9981 etc rather than http://martin-pi4:9981. If one computer doesn't need to access another one, or if the name service is sufficient for it to work, then it doesn't matter what IP a computer has today. It's only servers that need fixed IP addresses.

But I prefer to achieve this reserving of IP addresses at the router rather than at each device. In particular, a portable device such as a phone, tablet or laptop will almost certainly need to be used on networks other than the one in your home, so you can't fix its IP address for its wifi interface. AFAIK, an IP is fixed for the interface, not for the specific SSID of the network, so you can't fix the IP when connected to your home SSID but allow it to get the IP by DHCP for any other SSID.

The other week I had to change my network fairly radically which required changing from 10.120.1.x to 192.168.1.x, for reasons which are fairly complicated but boil down to wanting one DHCP/DNS rather than two cascaded (one on Linksys Velop and one on VDSL router) in the hope that it would cure an obscure problem (*). It would have been a right pain if I've had to change the static IP on every single computer on the network. Instead I copied the address reservations from 10.120.1.x to 192.120.1.x (I kept the same "x" for a given computer because I'd learned that 72 and 73 were my two Pis etc).

To use your telephone analogy, the allocation of phone numbers is done at the exchange by allocating a given number to a given line-pair. If the number had to be changed (eg adding a new prefix digit such as changing 0532

671xxx to 0113 2671xxx on PhONEday) it is done centrally at the exchange: you don't have to go round to everyone's house to change a phone number allocation on the phone.

(*) It didn't: after about a month of flawless service, I'm back to certain Adnroid and iPad devices not being able to access one specific web site, which isn't cured by rebooting router or phone/tablet, or clearing browser caches. Why it only affects some devices, one specific (public) web server and my VDSL connection (but not my phone's mobile internet) is still a mystery.

I effectively use static addresses on my LAN because I also find moving addresses to be a nuisance, but do it by running a private DNS (named) on my house server, alongside my main MTA (postfix) and spamtrap (spamassassin).

named was easy enough to install and set up. Adding or removing addresses as the population of devices on my LAN changes is equally simple. I prefer to name everything on my LAN and the named configuration is a convenient central repository for that stuff.

Re: Re: Printer support? By: Jan Panteltje to snipped-for-privacy@privacy.invalid on Mon Mar 14 2022 12:15 pm

I also like everything keeping the same IP if possible.

Suffices to say that, at home, I have a LAN segment just for myself in which every device uses static IPs and static ARP. The rest of the family may have all the DHCP they want :-)

When I want to manage a moderate ammount of computers at job I find it easier to use static DHCP leases.

On a sunny day (Mon, 14 Mar 2022 13:24:54 -0000) it happened "NY" snipped-for-privacy@privacy.invalid wrote in <t0nfoc$bun$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

Sure, I admit to sometimes starting dhcpd when I connect my Android to the Linksys WiFi modem I have to the LAN. Last time was last year I think... Wifi was one hacked here I think, because strange things happened, now everything is wired. Hacking WiFi is something any kid can download scripts for.

For remote control of things I have one remote keyboard like this:

leave the mosue in an xterm, and give any command. Normaly I have a script running in that xterm that allows me set set volume and select music that way. Raspi recognizes it just like a an other keyboard. Mine has al the function keys too.. older model.

I was trying to access rt.com (Russia English website) from my laptop this morning and got 'browser refused'. Then I tried Chromium or a Rp4 and it worked. May have been temporary, worked yesterday.