Stylus C62 Ink checking

PhilD · 07-03-2003, 02:10 PM

Hello,

I am trying to get ink monitoring working for my Epson Stylus C62. I have searched this site and found a few posts, none of which corrected my problem.

My system is a Mandrake 9.1 with Cups. Printing works fine from the local machine and from my Win boxes through Samba. I did some looking around and found that mtink should be able to check the ink level. I also found the escputil from gimp-print. Neither of these can access the printer and report the ink levels.

I checked my /dev/lp0 and it links to /dev/printers/0 which is suid and read/write. Besides this, neither programs works as root either.

The escputil error states that I need access to the raw device, even when run as root. Mtink gives a similar error in a pop up. I thought maybe it was my parallel port, but turboprint for linux (demo) worked fine. I would like to get this functionality without the limits of this demo though.

Please, does anyone have any suggestions for me to try? Is there any more information I can provide that would be helpful?

Thank you for the help!!

PhilD

rshaw · 07-03-2003, 02:21 PM

at the root prompt, cd to the directory that contains mtink and enter chown root mtink, then chmod 4755 mtink

PhilD · 07-03-2003, 02:40 PM

I think I have tried this, but I will do it again for kicks when I get home. Root should be able to run it with out this though shouldn't it?

PhilD · 07-07-2003, 11:40 AM

rshaw,

I tried this again with no luck. It took me a little while to get my printer working again. I accidentally installed the mtink daemon and it wouldn't let anything access the printer until I removed it.

As it stands, I can still not check ink levels with mtink or escputil, even as root. It would really be nice to figure out why!

I did notice that the /dev/lp0 link does not have write access. I won't add it with chmod though. Even with this, I tried addressing /dev/printers/0 directly with both programs with no success.

Anyone else have any ideas?

Thanks for any help!

PhilD

PS. One other thing, /dev/printers/0 is owned by 'lp' and group is 'sys', is this correct?

rshaw · 07-07-2003, 04:07 PM

i haven't ran mandrake since ver. 7.1 so i'm going to be no help, sorry

PhilD · 07-08-2003, 10:07 AM

Thanks anyway rshaw,

I am sure someone here has seen this problem and can help.

PhilD

busbarn · 07-08-2003, 11:00 AM

epson-kiowa (?) has linux drivers for the epson c62. Do a google search for the exact name. Go to their site, download it, (either rpm or source) and install it. It comes with really good directions for installation. You will then need start the driver (ekpd I think) and then change your settings in cups. Once all that is running, you can run ekpstm and a nice printer monitor gui comes up with printer status and ink level for both color and black. It works really well.

PhilD · 07-08-2003, 12:51 PM

Thank you!! I will grap this tonight and give it a try. If I run into anything major I will let you know.

PhilD

P.S. Doing some searching I think it is epson-kowa, without the 'i'.

jjsarton · 09-29-2003, 07:35 AM

Hi PhilD,

Why don't you have send a mail to the author of mtink ?

In the mean time I have a new version which shall work correctly.
There was a little bug within the daemon and the monitor itself
was a little bit modified.

It will be nice to test the new version and report if all is now OK

http://xwtools.automatix.de

Jean-Jacques