Hi, Solus now finds my old Epson Stylus DX4850 printer connected via usb cable (no bluetooth or network printing). I have installed Epson escrp, Gutenprint and Cups from the software centre. When I try to print something the printer symbol appears in the top right-hand corner of the screen with printing in progress and then printing completed but nothing is printed. On the Epson website it says there are no drivers for this printer for Linux. Can anyone help? Any clever developers who can write / create a driver and if so how do I apply it ( bear in mind that I'm just an average user here🙂. It is a great little printer and it would be a shame if I'm not able to use it with Solus. When I was distro hopping it did work out-of-the-box with Linux Mint and Elementary OS. However, I prefer and really like Solus. If this little issue could be resolved that would be fantastic. Thanks

At dev tracker (upper leftish of your screen) there are two threads (use search) about the stylus. I read a couple workarounds I thought. Also, for one concerned owner, it turned out to be a permissions thing.
If none of that is applicable you could request it at dev tracker if you could furnish the maintainers a .deb or .rpm link to the exisiting linux driver.
But if Epson says (you said this) this is one of the rare models where no linux support exists than one can't be invented that I know of.
If it worked OOB on other distros I wonder what the difference was?
At this site for Ubu:https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupportComponentsScannersEpson,
there is this for the 4850:
"You need to add the product ID and device ID to /etc/sane.d/epson.conf, ie set the usb line to "usb 0x04b8 0x0819". You can get the IDs with sane-find-scanner (install sane-utils). Then "sudo gedit /etc/udev/rules.d/45-libsane.rules": add your scanner in GROUP="scanner"; make sure your user-ID is in the group "scanner". Ignore the error-messages when closing the xsane."
edit: I wouldn't tamper with this in solus but I wonder if it's saying the sane-backends package might pick up the slack.

---I don't know how you'd do this in Solus but if it works elsewhere you can make it work here. My DDG search for "linux Epson Stylus DX4850" has some leads.

sorry so verbose, good luck.

telorast Seems that DX4850 has an integrated card reader and that's the the only difference between the two models.

Dang that is some good research. Was going to offer the old switcheroo as an option but didn't see it could happen.

    telorast
    Hi telorast#49661
    Thanks ever so much for your research. I looked at the old article you suggested. I am married to a German and lived in Germany for over 20 years so that wasn't a problem for me. The useful bit in the article that I would like to share is that for the Epsom DX4850 model (and I presume other models too) it recommends selecting the driver for the CX4700 model.
    So this is what I did. First I entered the command sudo lsusb to see which ports the printer was connected to and noted it down e.g 002 004. Then the command sudo chgrp lp /dev/bus/usb/002/004 and then sudo lpinfo -v | grep direct. This showed direct usb:// Epson..... Next I opened the printer settings, clicked add printer, selected Epson from the list and then CX4700 from the next list and low and behold I was able to print a test page. Have since printed out several other docs. Printer now working perfectly. I'm very happy 😄