The wide, 40”, Epson SylusPro 9600 printer is mostly alive. One of the nozzles appears to be clogged, but probably my biggest issue is getting it to talk to my computer. Windows 11 seems to see it and I can even get ink levels off it but when I try to print to it it goes into the spooler and then just vanishes with nothing getting printed. I’m having to do everything from the physical control panel (alignment check, nozzle clean, etc). Epson does not have a driver after XP. I’m wondering about spooling up a VM with XP on it just to talk to the printer. Has anyone done this?
Ryan tells me that CUPS + Gutenprint has a driver for this model (a quick search finds this), so I’m planning to test this on Tuesday if I can.
If this works, it might be much easier to use a Ras Pi than to worry about isolating a Windows VM or tracking down the driver issues on Windows 11.
Follow up from the Slack discussion - I got the Raspberry Pi for the Vinyl Cutter running (who took the microSD card out anyway?), fixed the residual DNS problems, plugged the banner printer into the Pi, and it showed right up in new printers in CUPS.
I moved things around and have a monitor and keyboard hooked up, should be able to finish that and clean up tomorrow.
We still need to set up a replacement DNS server for the space to make it easily accessable on the network.
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Sweet! So then how would one print something to it? Would you save a PDF or EPS file?
You could, but CUPS should just let it act as a network printer that things auto-discover.