EPSON XP-212 printer scanner on Navigatrix

I bought an EPSON XP-212 printer scanner. The idea was to use it on the boat with an inverter, maybe handy for printing out weather forecasts and maps and perhaps scanning and printing pages from pilot books.

It cost me £50 from  a shop in Macclesfield (www.tecnikk.co.uk).


Initial test is with the computer at home with an identical version of Navigatrix linux.


First of all the instructions that come with it are almost completely useless and the CD that comes with it is basically a link to the web site! Good job I had a go at doing this at home.

To get the printer to connect to my home wireless access point seemed impossible using just wifi, although the EPSON web site had a mac application that connected (after a long wait) to the printer and then told it the password for my home access point (interestingly I have more than one access point and it did not give me a choice).

Once configured it appeared as a network printer when I did Preferences>Printer Configuration.

This worked fine and I printed a test page.

I could not however get it to scan over wifi so I plugged in the USB. I then tried Office>Scan documents but it could not find a scanner.

I then installed xsane as alternative scanner. Same problem.

Then I went to download EPSON drivers.

iscan_2.29.3-1~usb0.1.ltdl7_i386.deb
iscan-data_1.29.0-2_all.deb
iscan-network-nt_1.1.1-1_i386.deb

(actually you need to install the data one first)

from the EPSON website.

Simple Scan and Xsane still didnt work. However if I tried

sudo xsane

(which gives you a warning that you must be insane to run sane as root)  worked ok.

Its clearly a problem with permissions.

Possible solution is here on an Ubuntu forum

I tried the groups and permissions thing and that didnt work so I tried the more dangerous (well it is a single user system!) approach of adding this to
/etc/udev/rules.d/40-scanner-permissions.rule

# usb scanner
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", MODE:="0666"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb_device",MODE:="0666"

Both scanning programs now work. Over USB connection at least .

I am planning on installing a Netgear wireless router (it has a 12v supply) aboard Tui. This should enable me to use the printer wirelessly from other devices aboard... but that is another story.