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Tutorial – EPSON XP-231 and Ubuntu 16.04

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After moving some of the servers to Brazil I needed a  new printer that had cartridges readily available in the country.

After doing some research, I ended up with an Epson XP-231.

 

Epson_XP231

To be honest, the new printer is really similar the old printer attached to the system back in the USA.

Now the catch: this is a new printer, so Epson has not officially released the full set of drivers for it. But this has never been a good reason for me not to try to make it work and, hopefully, have some fun along the way. .

Keep in mind that I am not a big fan of putting the printer on the WiFi, so this tutorial will not deal with the WiFi connectivity, as I connected the printer through the USB Port.

Without further ado:

Step 1 – Connect the printer to the PC

Plug the printer into the USB port, remember, this tutorial is not covering the WiFi feature.

Step 2 – Making the printer work

We need to install the printer-driver-escpr package from the standard repositories

sudo apt-get install printer-driver-escpr

Next you just add a new printer through Ubuntu’s printer application.

 

printers_app

Once you click add, Ubuntu will find the printer and recommend the Epson drivers you just installed. You will see that the the XP-231 is not in the list. However, if you choose the XP-225 the printer function will work perfectly.

Step 3 – Making the scanner work

There are several versions of the scanner drivers for Epson Multi-function printers out there, so be careful to download the right version.

You are looking for a version that supports the XP-235 series: imagescan bundle  version 1.1.8 – Epson calls it Image Scan V3.  The iscan 1.0.0 package will not work.

I downloaded the package through the XP-235 download page from the UK site. Yes,this was a rather tricky to find.

To save you some time and headache this is the link – updated link.

Keep in mind that the package requires the sane package to be installed before you install the driver. To be safe, and because it is a rather cool scanning package, I like to install the full xsane scan program.

So, it all comes down to the following commands:

sudo apt-get install xsane
cd [wherever you downloaded drivers]
tar xaf imagescan-bundle-ubuntu-16.04-1.1.8.x64.deb.tar.gz
cd imagescan-bundle-ubuntu-16.04-1.1.8.x64.deb
./install.sh --without-network

At this point, I rebooted the system and  xsane and Simple Scan  were able to scan a document successfully.

4 thoughts on “Tutorial – EPSON XP-231 and Ubuntu 16.04”

    1. Unfortunately, Epson keeps changing the link. I ran many posts about the link. Sorry, Epson really makes it hard to keep the link correct.

  2. Since the scanner drivers link is dead, I ended up downloading the Vuescan app. It works for XP 231.

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