Epson TX101 installation

Update, Jaunty onwards: Epson has a new release with libtdl7 support. Try that first instead of wasting your time doing the following. The following works only for Intrepid 8.10 and perhaps, Hardy 8.04 release with an Epson driver for libtdl3.

(In case you hit this page to find how-to install, skip blabber, jump straight to end of this weblog for stepwise instructions)

I bought Epson TX101 printer-scanner-copier a few days back and was waiting for the Epson chap to install it due to warranty issues that the seller told me of. Needless to say, when he turned up yesterday, not only didn't he know Ubuntu installation, but he hadn't even heard Ubuntu or Linux for that matter! He did some basic Vista install and looking at his "expertise", I had to ask him to just make the installation report and leave.

My efforts on getting it to work on Ubuntu took long U-turns due to my stupidity. First of all, I tried things yesterday night when I was barely keeping myself awake on the chair! Back to technicality, I tried gutenprint, iscan, xsane, CUPS and pips, when things didn't work by default when I plugged in the USB. Of course, I made the mistake of typing in xane instead of xsane earlier on. But today, I started afresh when iscan install cried for libltdll3 in the night! Later I found out that iscan was (perhaps) installed by default on Kubuntu, with a dependency error; same thing as libltld3.

Intrepid, possibly Hardy too, uses libltdl7. So a simple fix is to make a soft link to libltdl3 and I should have been on the way, but it didn't work. It needed a simple replug of USB cable and not only iscan, xsane worked too!

Steps:

1. Download the correct package from http://www.avasys.jp/lx-bin2/linux_e/spc/DL1.do.
2. Make sure you have sane and sane utils installed. Use sudo synaptic to find out.
3. Also make sure you have libltdl7. (Of course, you can't get a libltdl3! :) )
   
4. Install Image Scan and Print system by running sudo dpkg -i --ignore-depends=libltdl3 iscan_2.17.0-3_i386.deb (or whatever the name/version is).
5. Do a sudo find / -name libltdl.so.7. cd there. (Of course, one level higher!!!)
   
6. Create soft link by ln -s libltdl.so.7 libltdl.so.3.
7. For some reason (read above blabber), I did the following too. Do it if you need to.
   
8. Do a sudo find / -name libltdl7. cd there. (Of course, one level higher!!!)
   
9. Create soft link by ln -s libltdl7 libldtl3
10. Create soft link by ln -s libltdl7 libldtl3-dev
11. Plug-out (if plugged in) and plug-in the TX101 USB cable. I didn't do this and wasted a lot of time finding out why iscan and/ or xsane wasn't working. Both were needing me to replug the TX101!
12. You're done.
13. Test printer: Go to http://localhost:631 for CUPS, check if you've the printer right. Do a test print. You'll get the print below.
14. Test scanner: Open iscan or xsane. Scan works as below. :)