EPSON Printer Driver installation Issues

Software PureOS
41

Have you tried it with PureOS 10/Byzantium? I also have an Epson (WF series) which worked like a charm under PureOS 9/Amber, which seamlessly found it on the wireless network and printed perfectly from day 1 onwards, 18+months ago.

PureOS 10/Byzantium, however … that’s a different story so far.

Downloaded the allegedly appropriate Linux driver package from Epson. Then did:

Librem15:~/Downloads$ sudo apt-get install ./epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2_1.1.45-1lsb3.2_amd64.deb
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Note, selecting 'epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2' instead of './epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2_1.1.45-1lsb3.2_amd64.deb'
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2 : Depends: lsb (>= 3.2) but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

Librem15:~/Downloads$ sudo apt-get install lsb
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Package lsb is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package 'lsb' has no installation candidate

Both lsb-base and lsb-release are installed, from the byzantium repo, as version 11.1.0pureos1 (byzantium).

So, if you have moved up to byzantium, have you managed to finesse this issue as you did above for amber? This is now the one last thing holding me back from a working system such as I had before the upgrade to byzantium, which was a fresh install of the OS (not a dist-upgrade), and a restore from backup of the data files in Home. Thus, it is a totally clean byzantium system.

Any ideas applicable from your quest?

42

If you have a .deb package you want to install, its better to use sudo dpkg -i name-of-deb instead of sudo apt install.

43

I actually did do a

$ sudo dpkg -i epson-inkjet-printer-escpr2_etc_.deb

but it bombed out due to the unmet dependencies error, and then needed a

$ sudo apt --fix-broken install

to clean things up, which is why I then went down the $ sudo apt route.

The problem seems to be that the driver package is expecting lsb to be installed (since it is a dependency) and yet the instructions at Epson’s site, namely to do

$ sudo apt install lsb

are clearly no longer valid (whereas it may have been at some stage), since APT says there is no such thing to install.

So, the main question is: what is the workaround to get lsb installed on Byzantium/Bullseye in such a way that the printer driver package recognises that it is?

44

Generally, dpkg is the way to go.

For lsb, this may help, but you’ll be on your own:

https://packages.debian.org/source/buster/lsb