I just bought an Epson ET 3958, and the immediately available software for both the printer and the scanner seems to be in Packman, both an ESC P/R printer driver, and something unknown to run the iscan application for the scanner. However, the Change log for these packages stops in 2020, so it seems like there ought to be something newer. When I search on ‘linux drivers for epson inkjet printers’ I am lead to an Epson site download.ebz.epson.net… where I can search for my specific model number, and find 2 rpms (misspelled as rmp) for the print driver and epson print utility, and 1 tar.gz file for the scanner. These have been updated as recently as a week ago. I assume these are better? Are these proprietary, and that’s why they are not in the distribution?
I am also confused by the source of the ppd files for my printer. I don’t actually find one when I try to configure it under the older software, but I choose another model, ET-4800, and that seems to work fine. The scanner configuration does not work at all, not even recognition on the network, but is that because the new scanner is an eSCL device? Ultimately, should I expect SANE to work on this scanner, or must I use the Epson Scan 2 application?
Thanks for shedding any light on this. I did download the newer software and the accompanying manuals, but I have not un-installed the older packages pending more information.
I’m not sure that there would be much advantage in using the Epson drivers. If the included ghostscript/gutenprint driver works for this model, I’d stay with using it.
Regarding the scanner device, using the Epson scanner driver is one option. If you want to try the driverless option, then you’d need to update SANE (subscribing to the graphics repo)…
in the opensuse repo is this
epson-inkjet-printer-escpr - Epson ESC/P-R Inkjet Printer Driver
Version:1.8.6-1.1
it supports my ecoscan 2760
or
use the rpm’s on the epson site
1)epson-printer-utility - Epson Printer Utility for Linux
2) epsonscan2 - Next Generation Image Acquisition Utilities
3) epsonscan2-non-free-plugin - Next Generation Image Acquisition Utilities
On the Epson website, the two printers you mention give different results, which show that :
Epson Inkjet Printer Driver (ESC/P-R) for Linux is for ET-2760 series.
ET-3950 Series needs Epson Inkjet Printer Driver 2(ESC/P-R) for Linux.
Differents printers, differents drivers.
I downloaded and extracted both RPMs. Then I compared them with diff --brief --recursive opt/epson-inkjet-printer-escpr /opt/epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2.
The output indicates that these two RPMs are completely different.
You can install both without risk of conflict ; each contains the binaries and ppd for one of your printers.