My epson Style 740 finally gave out earlier this year, joining a Lexmark E210 laser printer that had given out before that. That left me without a printer (though my wife has two nice printers for her graphics design business). So I decided to get a low end model for my home office. Having had so much luck with the Epson and knowing Epson support was good in Gutenprint drivers, I went for a new Epson.

The cheapest model at my local Office Max was the Epson Stylus Photo R280. This printer is supported under Gutenprint but under Fedora 9 it isn't. That's because the gutenprint package under fedora is missing the driver support for this printer. Fortunately, you just have to remove gutenprint and gutenprint-foomatic packages

sudo yum -y remove gutenprint gutenprint-foomatic

and then download the LSB 3.1 gutenprint rpm package from the OpenPrinting web site and install it:

sudo yum -y install gutenprint-5.0.1-1lsb3.1.i486.rpm

Note that OpenPrinting is the new version of the old LinuxPrinting.org, but it's under the LinuxFoundation's web site now.

The LSB3.1 gutenprint package is required because Fedora's gutenprint-5.0.2 package does not contain the driver for the Epson Stylus Photo R270, which is the driver used for the r280 too. Unfortunately, since the OpenPrinting package is a back rev (5.0.1) of the gutenprint release, every time you do a package update (yum update) the OpenPrinting package is replaced by the Fedora package. This means you need to manually remove the Fedora package and reinstall the OpenPrinting package after each update. I don't know why the Fedora package is missing the R270 driver.

Another important note on this is that you must get the LSB 3.1 gutenprint package from the OpenPrinting site. Fedora is an LSB (linux Standards Base) 3.1 compliant distribution, not an LSB 3.2 compliant system (see the output from the lsb_release command).

With the OpenPrinting version of the gutenprint package installed, configuring the printer under CUPS was pretty simple. You can also configure the printer using the gnome printer configuration utility (/usr/bin/system-config-printer from the command line).

Quality of the printer test is good but I've not done any serious prints with the printer yet. I don't print many documents any more so it's mostly intended for printing forms I need to fax or snail-mail.