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Epson NX-415 Setup with CUPS

Tired of my broken HP Photosmart, which never manged to work properly under any OS, I went out and bought an Epson Stylus NX415 All-In-One. This is a short summary of how I got it working under Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic), as it was a bit involved.

1. Avasys provides linux PPD drivers for Epson (and other) printers. For the NX415. Go to the above link, and then to the "All-in-Ones" section.
2. Fill the check-box that lists the NX415, put in the details for your machine at the bottom, and hit next.
3. On the page it sends you to, grab Epson-Stylus_NX415-pipslite-en.ppd, and the pipslite source file, pipslite_1.4.0-5.tar.gz. The version of iscan listed here doesn't work in 9.10, we'll address that once the printer portion is installed.
4. In order to get pipslite to compile correctly, I had to grab some additional packages, then make it.
   
   sudo apt-get install libgtk-dev gdk-imlib-dev tar xvfz ~/pipslite_1.4.0-5.tar.gz cd ~/pipslite_1.4.0-5/ ./configure --prefix=/usr make sudo make install
5. Now we need to move the PPD file to where CUPS can find it and set some permissions on it. If the model directory doesn't exist, be sure to create it first.
   sudo mkdir /usr/share/cups/model sudo cp ~/Epson-Stylus_NX415-pipslite-en.ppd /usr/share/cups/model cd /usr/share/cups/model sudo chmod 644 Epson-Stylus_NX415-pipslite-en.ppd
6. Now that pipslite is installed, and the driver is in place, restart CUPS.
   sudo /etc/init.d/cups restart
7. Point a browser to http://localhost:631/admin and click on Find a Printer. Epson Stylus NX-415 should show up as NX-410, select it.
8. When it asks for the driver, point it to the exact PPD file you moved to /usr/share/cups/model
9. If it doesn't print a test page correctly, then a reboot should sort out any remaining oddity.

Scanning with Epson NX-415

Ubuntu 9.10 makes this a bit harder than it needs to be, as a package required by iscan 2.23.0-3 (the package that allows scanning with this hardware) is no longer included in the repositories. Fortunately there is an older version (2.22.1-2) hidden away on AVASYS's site that appears to not have this dependency. Grab one of the following files (depending on your architechture) and it should install without issue.

• iscan for i386 (32-bit)
• iscan for amd64 (64-bit)

After a reboot, both iscan and xsane were able to use the scanner without a hitch. Somewhere along the way my user account got removed from the admins group (I suspect when it added me to the lp and lpadmin groups to allow printer access, it screwed something up), and I found myself unable to elevate with sudo. The fix, however, is an easy one. Either login as root or reboot in recovery mode using the root shell option and run the following: