Arch Linux

@Gerry2k5

Yikes! I haven't used Arch in forever! I forgot about the AUR. I will disown this package so that someone else can maintain it. It's a fairly easy package to maintain and update. Most of the work is already done.

I'm glad that this AUR package has made it easier for Arch users to use their "unsupported" (for shame, Kodak) ESP and other Kodak printers. :)

Someone, please take ownership of this PKGBUILD!

Works no problem over wireless with a Kodak esp c310.

I can verify that printing (from a USB connection) works fine for me with c2esp 26. I did not test over WiFi, though.

Updated c2esp to version 26. This now properly builds against libcups 1.6.x. If you have already installed version 25 with my instructions below, be sure to remove cups and libcups from your IgnorePkg line in /etc/pacman.conf, then run a full system update and continue as usual.

Thank you skanky for your involvement and bringing this to attention at the c2esp SourceForge page. I have been able to build and install this properly, but do not yet have access to my Kodak printer.

c2esp26 is now out.

Okay, I've successfully printed a test page now with rc6.

I can confirm that c2esp 26~rc6 builds and installs fine with CUPS 1.6.x without requiring the symlink workaround. Here are my package versions for reference:

cups: 1.6.1-6
libcups: 1.6.1-6
cups-filters: 1.0.23-1


Don't forget to restart the cups daemon (cups.service for systemd users) before attempting to print. PPDs appear to use the same names as the previous version, so no need to reconfigure the printer again. I don't have access to my Kodak printer at the moment, so I can't run a test print now. If printing works as before, rc6 is ready enough to be released as a stable version 26 in my opinion.

rc6 is now available and built successfully on my machine. I can't test printing until tomorrow morning now, but others might be able to.

@skanky

Thank you. Looks like it was upstream, after all. And of course, Arch is one of the first distros to pull from upstream, which is why other distros didn't have a problem building the c2esp driver. If the required headers do indeed now reside under cups-filters (as was pointed out in the thread about upstream CUPS changes), then it should be no problem in the PKGBUILD requirements, since cups depends on cups-filters and libcups.

The whole -devel thing (brought up by one of the posters) does not apply to Arch Linux in this specific case.

You can follow the 2.6 / Cups 1.6 discussion here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cupsdriverkodak/forums/forum/1107084/topic/5510765/index/page/2

I'm adskankster on there.

Incidentally, re your post below about two page documents, I printed a two page pdf with 2.6 rc5 in my test this morning.
I'll try some more tests at some point, but probably not in the next day or so.

@skanky

Thanks for the heads up. According to the README:

"Version 2.6
- As 2.5c but with a modified makefile to prepare for building with cups 1.6. Also a few more ppd files.
- NB Not tested with cups 1.6 yet."

Looks like the stable release of 26 will be published fairly soon. In that case, I will update the PKGBUILD, and hopefully the symlink workaround won't be required for libcups 1.6.x. In the meantime, I provided instructions in the comments below on how to install c2esp 25 with libcups 1.5.4.

For those who need the latest version of this, c2esp26~rc5 will build but you have to add a symlink for driver.h:

# ln -s /usr/include/cupsfilters/driver.h /usr/include/cups/driver.h

However the developer's working on this, so if you don't want to have to do that, you can probably wait a day or two.

For those who wish to install / use the Kodak c2esp printer driver, in light of the recent update to cups/libcups, download and install version 1.5.4 of cups and libcups from the Arch Rollback Machine:

1) First, download the following packages from this page (signatures are also available): http://arm.konnichi.com/search/index.php?a=32&q=cups&core=0&extra=1&community=0

wget http://arm.konnichi.com/extra/os/i686/cups-1.5.4-1-i686.pkg.tar.xz
wget http://arm.konnichi.com/extra/os/i686/libcups-1.5.4-1-i686.pkg.tar.xz

2) Force their installation with pacman (or yaourt)

sudo pacman -U cups-1.5.4-1-i686.pkg.tar.xz libcups-1.5.4-1-i686.pkg.tar.xz

3) Add cups and libcups to IgnorePkg under pacman.conf

IgnorePkg = cups libcups

4) Build the c2esp PKGBUILD like normal with yaourt, another helper, or manually with makepkg

yaourt -S c2esp



I hope this helps! Just remember, you will not get any updates to cups or libcups, since pacman will now ignore these updates. Hopefully, this issue will be fixed with a new version of c2esp that properly builds against cups 1.6.x. When that happens, just remove cups and libcups from IgnorePkg, update your system, and continue like normal.

@tgheretford

Ah, the joys of a rolling release! It appears the breakage was introduced with the change from libcups 1.5.x to 1.6.x in the official Extra repo. You'll notice that my PKGBUILD was updated for 25c-1 on July 18th, while the libcups package changed from 1.5.x to 1.6.x on July 30th. In other words, anyone trying to use this PKGBUILD before the 30th of July will not have any issues; however, those who try after July 30th will not be able to build the c2esp printer driver.

Not sure if this is due to the Arch packagers or upstream cups developers. Usually, other distros will have -devel counterparts to different packages; e.g, cups and cups-devel. In our case with Arch Linux, the libcups package provides the necessary headers to build certain printer drivers. At least, up until libcups 1.6.x was released.

@flan_suse - yep, cups installed and up-to-date prior to using yaourt to install c2esp. That was the first thing I thought of, still fails to compile with aforementioned error.

@tgheretford

Do you have cups installed? If so, it should automatically pull in libcups as a dependency.

This package (c2esp) requires cups as a dependency, so if you use an AUR helper, such as yaourt, cups (as well as libcups) should automatically be installed as dependencies. The same will happen if you manually build with "makepkg -s".

Version 25c-1 fails to compile on my system, it falls over at 'Error: /usr/include/cups/image.h is not installed!' and asks the user to install the CUPS raster library package.

Version 25c of the c2esp printer driver was released. Here is the comment from the README file:

"As 25b but with patch from awl29 applied and some other mods. The problems with AIO 5100 5300 5500 seem to actually have been problems with cups caused by errors in the ppd files. Now these errors are fixed, so we expect to no longer have these problems. Reports of testing would be helpful."

@skanky

Glad to hear the good news. I would try to print 2 pages or more from a single document. The reason I say this is because in the past (older versions of this driver), only the *first* page of a document would print successfully, yet the subsequent pages would simply be smeared in black ink or random horizontal lines. This is why the "test page" print is not always the best indicator that everything works.

Thanks for the update.

Incidentally, I have managed to print a test page to a Hero 5100 AIO with the 25b driver (not needed to print more than that yet). So it might be worth a try, but make sure you know how to role back first.

@skanky
Thanks for the notice! Fixed!

I also added "make clean" in the build() process.

This is from the official README, in case anyone is interested: IT SEEMS THAT THIS VERSION MAY NOT WORK WITH THE AIO 5100 5300 5500 PRINTERS.

The above warning applies to version 25, 25a, and 25b (the latest version as of this post.)

This PKGBUILD no longer works as there is no http://downloads.sourceforge.net/cupsdriverkodak/c2esp25.tar.gz available now. Need to either use 25a or 25b as the package version.

The latest version of this driver introduces preliminary support for the Kodak HERO printer series.

Third-party open source CUPS driver for Kodak ESP printers. Officially supports the ESP5, but has been reported to work on Kodak's ESP3, ESP7, and ESP9 printers.

No scanning support as of version 16.

It has been over three years, and still no official Linux drivers from Kodak for these inkjet printers. This is currently the only feasible way to print with your ESP printer from a Linux computer.

If you are facing difficulties with cups 1.4.x, try installing the cups-usblp package from the AUR and restarting the cups service.