Epson Epl 5700L laserprinter opensuse 12.1

Hello,
after a fresh install of opensuse 12.1, my printer is recognised by Yast , bu Yast cannot find any suitable driver for finishing the installation.
The printer has been working under opensuse 11 but in this version I am not able to use this parport printer.
Thanks in advance for any help.

On Mon March 19 2012 01:16 pm, jomajo wrote:

>
> Hello,
> after a fresh install of opensuse 12.1, my printer is recognised by
> Yast , bu Yast cannot find any suitable driver for finishing the
> installation.
> The printer has been working under opensuse 11 but in this version I am
> not able to use this parport printer.
> Thanks in advance for any help.
>
>
jojamjo;

I have no experience with this particular printer however Openprinting.org
lists the driver as epsonepl available from Epson. See:
http://www.openprinting.org/printer/Epson/Epson-EPL-5700L

I’ve generally found it is easier to use CUPS directly rather than YaST for
manipulating printers. ( https://localhost:631/ ). When asked by CUPS for
authentication, the username is root and the password is your root’s password.

P. V.
“We’re all in this together, I’m pulling for you.” Red Green

The printer has been working under opensuse 11 but in this version I am not able to use this parport printer.

The ‘lp’ module (for parallel connected printers) is not being loaded at boot by default anymore. Perhaps this is causing your configuration issue?

modprobe lp

then configure with CUPS web interface or YaST.
You can use YaST to get the ‘lp’ module loaded automatically at boot if necessary.

Have you managed to get this printer to work? I ask because I happen to have the same model, and until now I have not have had any luck with it. It works under windows, and it works nicely. But not Linux. :frowning:

(And as an aside, this printer has a USB port and can be connected that way. So no Parallel port needed.)

Have you managed to get this printer to work? I ask because I happen to have the same model, and until now I have not have had any luck with it. It works under windows, and it works nicely. But not Linux.

It is not clear from your post about what you have tried. Did you try using the CUPS web config interface? Which drivers have you tried? I note that there are foomatic and gutenprint drivers available. Did you get as far as a test print? (I don’t have this Epson printer, so I can’t test).

Hi Deano, I have actually tried a few things. Both with the YaST and with the WebConfig interface for Cups. And I don’t think it makes that much of a difference. They look similar enough and seem to both cover the things necessary. The printer is recognized by both YaST and the web interface without any problems.

Did I get as far as a test print? No, I did not manage to get a successful test print. I tried though. In fact the test print feature is what I have been using to check if the printer works. No luck.

So, what drivers have I tried? I tried with I found through YaST’s Cups interface first. There are .ppd for Epson-EPL-5700. Note the missing L in the designation. This is not the same as Epson-EPL-5700L. I tried anyway; I tried pretty much anything that has Epson-EPL-5700 in its name. And yeah, some of the .ppd’s had foomatic or guterprint in the name too.

Next I tried the epsonepl driver:
Driver: epsonepl | OpenPrinting - The Linux Foundation
venzkep more or less links to it in post #2. I downloaded, unpacked, compiled it into an .rpm and installed it. YaST however did not find any matching ppd, it merely found the ones I had already tried. (And no they didn’t work then either.) So, I pointed Yast’s Cups interface directly at the ppd’s that were containded in the epsonepl tarball, one at a time. But I always get the same error; the ppd does not adhere to cups specifications (or something to that effect). When I click details, I am told there is a whitespace in line 44, and that line XXX is longer than 255 Characters.

I have tried to fix the .ppd files by hand but I have had absolutely no luck with that. Have a look here:
SourceForge.net: Epson EPL-5x00L/EPL-6x00L Printer Driver: epsonepl-users
That is about the same issue, i.e. that some line is too long. The response from Hin-Tak Leung is:

You should be able to regenerate the ppd from running one of the scripts in the foomatic_scripts directory. but it isn’t too difficult to do by hand - you just break the line where it complains, and put “&&” where it breaks for continuation. (in shell scripts you do "", in ppds you do “&&” - it is that simple).

Now I don’t know what exactly to do with the foomatic scripts, but I did try to manually split the offending line. No. I looked at other .ppd files to see how exactly such a line break is done. I recreated it as well as I could. No. I just get different errors when I feed the .ppd to cups.

I do have a hunch that the lines where the errors occur are different from the lines where the splitting method with && works. For example, an excerpt from the .ppd for the Alps-MD-1000 found in ‘/usr/share/cups/model/OpenPrintingPPDs/ghostscript/’:

*FoomaticIDs: Alps-MD-1000 md2k
*FoomaticRIPCommandLine: "gs -q -dBATCH -dPARANOIDSAFER -dQUIET -dNOPA&&
USE -sDEVICE=md2k%A%Z -sOutputFile=- -"
*End

And now the line that is too long from ‘/path/to/epsoneplijs-0.4.1/cups/Epson-EPL-5700L-epl5700lusb-cups.ppd.gz’:

*% COMDATA #  'pnp_des' => undef,
*% COMDATA #  'cmd' => 'gs -q -dBATCH -dSAFER -dNOPAUSE -sProcessColorModel=DeviceGray -dBitsPerSample=1 -sDEVICE=ijs %A %Z -sIjsServer=ijs_server_epsonepl -dIjsUseOutputFD -sDeviceManufacturer=Epson -sDeviceModel=EPL5700L -sIjsParams="USB=on,%B" -sOutputFile=- -',
*% COMDATA #  'snmp_cmd' => undef,

In the first example the lines start with just “" and apparantly splitting with “&&” works. In the second example the lines begin with "% COMDATA #” and splitting the lines as described does not work.

Meh. That is where I am stuck.

(I also found this posting from Ubuntu forums:
[all variants] [SOLVED] installing epsonepl driver - Ubuntu Forums]([all variants] [SOLVED] installing epsonepl driver)
And I tried to get that to work on some older Kubuntu (9.04?) that I have lying around. I get the same specification problem as I detailed above.)

^^^ I hope any of that makes sense. ^^^

I got it! I compiled and installed foomatic-db, foomatic-engine, foomatic-filters. I also ran some of the scripts that came with the epsonepl tarball. And … oh, I don’t know. But Yast now finds .ppd files that I can use. And printing a test page works.

Good to know you got there. Thanks for the update.

Actually, the story turned out to have a few more chapters. Yes, it had worked. And then all of a sudden (or so) it no longer did. And now it does again. Don’t ask me what I did; this is all very mystic to me.