I was a bit worried that I wouldn’t be able to use my Epson Stylus Photo RX425 printer with a 64-Bit Ubuntu 8.04 install, as Avasys/Epkowa haven’t written a 64-Bit version of PIPS. So the alternative was to install a 32-Bit Ubuntu or a distro like Fedora that includes both 32 and 64-Bit libraries in its 64-Bit installation.

Anyway, I think I’ve gotten around it with help from this forum post. I can’t really test it actually prints as I’m doing it in a Virtual Machine until I build my fileserver next week sometime, but it did at least start the ekpd daemon, ekpstm ink monitor and CUPS registered the printer.

Basically I built a 32-Bit PIPS .deb file on a 32-Bit VM, using alien to convert the RPM (oh did I mention they also don’t supply .deb files, only .rpm?!) using instructions here.

Next I installed the 32-Bit libraries into Ubuntu:

apt-get install ia32-libs lsb-core libgtk1.2
dpkg -i --force-architecture pips-sprx420-425-430s-cups_2.6.2-3_i386.deb

Next we install getlibs which is some kind of wrapper around apt-get that installs the 32-Bit libraries that ekpstm needs to work:

dpkg -i getlibs-all.deb
getlibs /usr/bin/ekpstm

Thankfully there’s an experimental 64-Bit Ubuntu 8.04 .deb package for iScan which is being actively developed here, so I’ll be able to get the scanner part working too, I did a test install and the Gimp plugin is certainly working (again, can’t test in a VM).

I watched Watchmen, which was an absolute waste of three hours of my life! The reviews seem to be an equal 50:50 split, you either love it (comicbook fanboys) or hate it (general public).