Alright, my mom and I bought a brank new Epson Stylus CX7300 printer to replace our old HP C90. The C90 was a good printer, but the ink cartridges cost an arm and a leg. The CX7300 is pricey at the beginning at ~P7,500 (~US$163), but in the long run, cartridges are more affordable and efficient. Colors can be replaced individually, as opposed to the C90 which needs all its colors replaced simultaneously and all four (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) together are even cheaper than the CMY and B of a C90. On top of the that, the CX7300 is a printer, scanner and photocopier with Pict-Bridge and SD support. The technology of the CX7300 is new to me, so it has some very slight learning curve with all the features. A good and thorough read of the documentation won’t hurt.

To the people in the household, using the printer would be as easy as plugging the USB connector in, and click “print”. But someone has to do the dirty work to network everything together into one seamless symphony of wireless convergence…

Bleh!

Within less than six hours, I have configured (or at least tried to) two Windows machines, one Linux notebook and a Mac Book. My difficulty is not with the printer, but with the network intergration of the printer, computers and or wireless print server, Linksys WPS54G. We got the print server a few months ago and it seems to have gathered a bad reputation online as one of the most difficult print servers to use… and for good reason! When I was still setting-up the print server, the installation software, the drivers and utilities that came with the device are all clunky and unreliable. The configuration utility crashes often and hardly gets anything done without hassle. Accessing the local configuration utility (192.168.1.XXX) of the WPS54G was a complete nightmare. It was badly, terribly and horribly buggy. It would time-out, lose its connection and simply fail to load. By default, the WPS54G does not even support WPA encryption! There was a firmware upgrade available online but it was old (version 6049). In the Linksys fora, there was a 6050 file floating around, but it could only be downloaded when supported was contacted. Thankfully, someone posted it. Once I got the new firmware up, it still won’t support WPA/2. Turns out that the poorly documented support section of Linksys had an updated installer that supports WPA/2. I downloaded it and finally got the thing working. The print server has been working just well so far.

I was not surprised that setting up the CX7300 with Windows did not cause much trouble. This was the case for both Windows XP installations of my brother and I. The Epson drivers and the Printers section of Windows XP were pretty straight forward. I got it up and running in no time–both wired and wirelessly.

The center of my headaches and heartaches are the Unix machines–Ubuntu Linux and Mac OS X.

I was pleasantly surprised when Ubuntu detected the printer through USB effortlessly. That improved printer integration in Gutsy Gibbon makes Ubuntu much more efficient. It installed the drivers with no problem and printing a test page was no problem. The problem, however was in wireless printing. I’ve tried adding the print server as a Samba/Windows printer or Unix printer, but it just wouldn’t print directly. I even tried using the correct drivers and generic drivers. Nothing. Frustrated, I tried to explore other options. There is a programming adage that goes, “There are many ways to kill a cat. All you have to do is pick one.” So I thought of routing the printer through my working Windows desktop configuration. In turn, my Linux notebook would send the print to the my desktop and would then relay the message to the print server. It worked… almost. Whenever I tried to print, the printer would always stop. It stops in the same place at the same time. I though this was a signal reception issue, but the stops were consistent. I spent some time reconfiguring, and experimenting and the problem demoted itself to a caveat when I spent time the the Windows printer settings. The problem was caused by incorrect spooling settings. I set my Windows configuration to spool then entire document first then print. Voila! Full page print.

Mac OS X is something different. I was pulling my hair trying to figure out what went wrong. It’s a story of nothing working at all. The Epson printer came with Mac drivers and installers and those drivers did not do anything at all. After a full installation, there were no additional programs or utilities that the installer should’ve added. Only a digitized version of the documentation on the desktop. The drivers did not help OS X find the printer and no entry for the CX7300 was added to OS X’s printer utility. Even if the printer wasn’t supposed to be manually added, there were no CX7300 entries in printing programs. OS X detects the print server but is unable to do anything meaningful to it.  There were no CX7300 drivers the Mac Book shipped with, and not even the Epson CD helped. What was left to do? I gave up for today, and try again tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll get something out of the Mac.

Sigh, the pangs of technology. Such big beast, and it needs someone to tame it. Ay, there’s the rub.

Wish me luck!

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Installing 64 bit print drivers on a 32 bit Windows 2003 R2 print server