Arch Linux User Repository

In reply to ValdikSS comment:

Note that Epson license (COPYING.EPSON) imposes many restrictions, such as personal and internal business usage only, prohibition of distribution of the software, and "you agree not to place the Software onto or into a shared environment accessible via a public network such as the Internet or otherwise accessible by others outside the single [physical] location"

Yes, which is why the Epson Inkjet printer driver 2 for ESC/P-R or "epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2" is only available as a PKGBUILD. Only the PKGBUILD is publicly available, not the driver itself, but with it everyone can easily obtain and build the driver for themselves. The license is not for the PKGBUILD. To uphold the Epson license however, the PKGBUILD references it correctly, and it is every ones own responsibility to respect Epson's license and to comply with it.

With every release I update the keywords (see Package Details above) containing a list of all Epson printer series supported by this driver. Additionally, SUPPORTED-PRINTERS at the GitLab repository gitlab.com/at.gentoo.repo/epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2 also contains a list of supported printers.

Most Epson Inkjet printers are covered by either this package or epson-inkjet-printer-escpr. If your printer is not supported by this package, be sure to check the other one. You may also want to consult the Wiki, specifically CUPS and CUPS/Printer-specific problems#Epson.

Note: all packages from AUR require base-devel, please read Arch User Repository as a user or PKGBUILD#makedepends for details on PKGBUILD.

I backed up my old folder first to be safe (new to this). I deleted the epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2 on my main C drive and ran (so you can dnld to your hard drive & edit):

yay -G epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2

Then went in and changed to, which worked the 1st time, Thank You !!

DLAGENTS=('https::/usr/bin/wget --user-agent=Firefox -O %o %u')

Then ran:

cd  epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2

makepkg -si

Thanks so much for this. I went out and bought a new printer a couple months ago because Epson I thought did NOT pull stuff like this. WTH do they care where people dnld drivers from. Now need to figure out the scanner, haven't looked for a month +, missed it by like 2 days before they pulled their shenanigans with the scanner.

@andit:

Thanks for the help. With chatgpt and your command i was able to understand what to do. I read the copy thing but i never found the patch where the downloaded file need to be put. But maybe for others, thats what i did:

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2.git cd epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2 nano PKGBUILD

Then edit the line andit said depending on what works for you and then run it with

makepkg -si

if none of that works and you download the file manually. The git clone will store the files in your /home/user/epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2/ where you can put the new tar.gz file from epson and run the makepg command. Hope that helps others.

@SlapJack: Thanks for the heads-up. The thing is, no one knows why it works for some people on their system and doesn't for others. I don't know either, I've merely copied what epson-inkjet-printer-escpr is using. Long story short: If wget works for you, simply put that as DLAGENTS= in the PKGBUILD. In other words, replace the line

DLAGENTS=('https::/usr/bin/curl --user-agent Firefox -qgb "" -fLC - --retry 3 --retry-delay 3 -o %o %u')

with

DLAGENTS=('https::/usr/bin/wget --user-agent=Firefox -O %o %u')

or, if this also fails, try

DLAGENTS=('https::/usr/bin/wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64)" -O %o %u')

in the PKGBUILD you downloaded from here. Then do your thing as you normally would (i.e. run makepkg)...

Anyhow, is it really coincidence that you report download troubles when on the Gentoo bugtracker someone just reported something similar? On Gentoo, someone had to use

wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/134.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" \
--referer="https://download-center.epson.com/" \
--header="Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8" \
--header="Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9" \
--no-check-certificate -O epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2-1.2.38-1.tar.gz  \
"https://download-center.epson.com/f/module/42a6470c-53bf-4993-abad-ba5b4a1d5d84/epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2-1.2.38-1.tar.gz"

to get the download to succeed. See here.

The bad news is: I just checked, and it works for me with curl and wget, with the much simpler command.

I'd just see what epson-inkjet-printer-escpr comes up with next. BTW, BlauFx commented at escpr (without the "2", so not escpr2) to simply put the downloaded file in the same directory with PKGBUILD.

There are certainly more capable people here (or in the Arch forums) than me. I'm mostly running another distribution, but since I'm also occasionally using Arch and I provide the other escpr2 package as well, I've stepped up to do the same work I do there for the PKGBUILD here. So, if anyone has a great idea for how to fix this for good, I'm all ears!

@andit

wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64)" https://download-center.epson.com/f/module/42a6470c-53bf-4993-abad-ba5b4a1d5d84/epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2-1.2.38-1.tar.gz

worked for me,

/usr/bin/curl -A 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64)' -fLC - --retry 3 --retry-delay 3 -o epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2-1.2.38-1.tar.gz https://download-center.epson.com/f/module/42a6470c-53bf-4993-abad-ba5b4a1d5d84/epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2-1.2.38-1.tar.gz

gave me also a url return error 403.

I hope that helps with fixing the update issue? Also if someone could tell me what to do to get the update to work, i would be super happy. I was able to donwload the file but i have no idea how to use it to make the update work.

Thank you very much for your work!

@vitaliikuzhdin: Thanks! I shamelessly copied the exact same DLAGENTS line from epson-inkjet-printer-escpr.

Since the .SRCINFO is unchanged, you may have to manually sync the PKGBUILD...

@andit, the Mozilla UA doesn't work from the CLI but works inside the PKGBUILD for a bizarre reason. See here: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/epson-inkjet-printer-escpr#comment-1064305

The wget command is working for me but the curl one returns a 403.

@PhrozenByte Thanks! I initially couldn't reproduce the 403 "forbidden" download error, since it continued to work for me. I just found out why: I had used a custom user agent string in my /etc/wgetrc, with which it continued to work.

I just rechecked, and my custom UA string is now also blocked by Epson. Shitty move on their part, I might add.

Also, "Mozilla" now also receives a 403. So this sounds like a cat-and-mouse game. If Epson continues to block UA strings, we may end up in a Netflix-like situation, where too old UA strings make it impossible to watch on Netflix, or in our situation that we have to adapt the PKGBUILD with current browser version user agent strings for the download to succeed.

Suggestions anyone?

Please check if "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64)" works for everyone, run either:

wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64)" https://download-center.epson.com/f/module/42a6470c-53bf-4993-abad-ba5b4a1d5d84/epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2-1.2.38-1.tar.gz

or

/usr/bin/curl -A 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64)' -fLC - --retry 3 --retry-delay 3 -o epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2-1.2.38-1.tar.gz https://download-center.epson.com/f/module/42a6470c-53bf-4993-abad-ba5b4a1d5d84/epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2-1.2.38-1.tar.gz

It looks like Epson is once again (as before) checking the user agent and blocking downloads:

==> Retrieving sources...
  -> Downloading epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2-1.2.38-1.tar.gz...
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed  Time    Time    Time   Current
                                 Dload  Upload  Total   Spent   Left   Speed
  0      0   0      0   0      0      0      0                              0
curl: (22) The requested URL returned error: 403
==> ERROR: Failure while downloading https://download-center.epson.com/f/module/42a6470c-53bf-4993-abad-ba5b4a1d5d84/epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2-1.2.38-1.tar.gz
    Aborting...
 -> error making: epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2-exit status 1

This can be fixed by adding the following to PKGBUILD:

DLAGENTS=("https::/usr/bin/curl -A 'Mozilla' -fLC - --retry 3 --retry-delay 3 -o %o %u")

I've added a patch submitted by DerFetzer which (re-)enables "Velvet Fine Art" paper in the driver. By default the "Velvet Fine Art" paper was previously treated as "EPSON Matte" paper, and my guess is that Epson was doing this because they had issues and this was their solution.

TL;DR This patch my introduce issues, but it fixes things for DerFetzer, who asked me to include it here.

Please report if you have issues as a result of this, thanks.