USB versus SMP and Epson printers.

[Don Lewis]

On  6 Aug, Frank Mayhar wrote:
> On Monday I received my brand-new Epson C82, a replacement for a 900N with
> a dead print head.  I had already configured CUPS so I imagined that I would
> just hook it up with USB and everything would be happy.
> 
> Well, that's not how it turned out.
> 
> I tried two different machines, both with Tyan dual-CPU motherboards.  One
> is a Thunder 2500 (S1867) with dual PIII 866, my gateway/fax/server
> box and the one I preferred.  The other is my main desktop box, a Tiger
> MPX (2466N-4M) with dual Athlon MP 1900+.  Both displayed essentially
> the same problem, although the Tiger MPX seemed to come a little bit
> closer to working than the Thunder 2500.
> 
> Basically, although usbdevs would show the device, when I tried to do,
> say, an 'escputil -s -r /dev/ulpt0' (to show the ink levels), the process
> would seem to send something to the printer (I say "seem to" because I
> saw no evidence of it on the printer side), then sit in the USB code
> forever, timing out and looping.

Unless someone snuck it in while I wasn't looking, our ulpt
implementation doesn't support reading data from the printer, so it's
not possible to check the ink levels.  I've had to boot Linux in order
to do this.