RHEL 7.4 cannot find printer

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Hi, I am running RHEL Server 7.4, and I am trying to setup a wireless printer: Epson NX430, When I go to settings->printers-> and click add, it says "No printers found". I don't know what's going on, or what to do? I used the same printer on 7.3 with no issue. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks! :)

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Do you have the avahi-daemon service installed and running? Apparently the autodetection of Epson NX430 uses that.

You may also need the driver for that printer.

http://download.ebz.epson.net/dsc/search/01/search/

Go to the above URL, type in "NX430" and select Linux as "Operation System". From the resulting list, you'll find two versions of the printer driver, a scanner driver, and a printer utility.

Thanks for your reply! I did try to download the drivers from the Epson website, which was this file: epson-printer-utility-1.0.2-1lsb3.2.x86_64.rpm

When I downloaded it, it opened the software center in RHEL, and it said the file type was not supported, and could not open it. I'm not sure what I did wrong? Thanks! :)

The file type might have been set incorrectly at the Epson website, which may have confused the browser. Or the file download may have been incomplete or corrupted somehow.

On the command line, you can use the sha1sum tool to verify the downloaded RPM files. Here are the sha1sum values I got:

$ sha1sum epson-*.rpm
1071b1d0d61a0ddb3dd1dd2e4a5e93111afc184d  epson-inkjet-printer-201105w-1.0.0-1lsb3.2.x86_64.rpm
9502747d317aa78ff8890a6cbc13f097bbee7150  epson-inkjet-printer-escpr-1.6.17-1lsb3.2.x86_64.rpm
0784c6e2491b6e285d7e9792b7c8923b88aac822  epson-printer-utility-1.0.2-1lsb3.2.x86_64.rpm

The epson-printer-utility-1.0.2-1lsb3.2.x86_64.rpm seems to be the printer utility, i.e. the tool that you can use to check printer ink levels, printer errors and other status information. But the actual driver would be epson-inkjet-printer-escpr-1.6.17-1lsb3.2.x86_64.rpm. The other driver file on the website, epson-inkjet-printer-201105w-1.0.0-1lsb3.2.x86_64.rpm seems to be much older, although it says it's the "full-featured driver".

All those are .rpm files you can install using the standard package management tools. I'm more of a server guy, so I don't use the GUI package management tools much. I would just download the RPMs to some directory, open a command prompt, cd to that directory, and then do yum localinstall *.rpm.

If you are connected to the same wireless network the printer is, the avahi-daemon should see the printer periodically broadcasting its presence information and forwarding the information to cupsd. That should allow the printer to be shown in the printer addition tools. But if that does not happen, you may need to find out the printer's IP address and tell it to CUPS. Usually, the printer can be made to print out a diagnostic page that includes its current IP address and any other important information.

If the printer has not been set up yet, you will need to do that first. Just like a computer joining your wireless network, the printer will need to know the name of your network and the password of the network in order to successfully connect to it. The easiest way to set up the printer would be to use a Windows-based configuration program which would copy the wireless network parameters from the Windows computer to the printer using a temporary USB connection, but if you only have a Linux system, that is not an option. Fortunately, it seems to be possible to input the network parameters manually using the printer's control panel, although that may be a bit tedious.

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