Epson stylus wireless printer and a netbook = no hair

[Athena's Owl]

I've been fighting with this for a couple of days now.

I have an Epson Stylus NX-330 that worked perfectly well with my windows machine.

the windows machine is a brick right now.

I bought an acer netbook a couple of months ago, tore windows 8 off it and installed 12.10 as the only operating system. My intent was simply to have a light, portable machine that I could take with me and write on. it's heavier than a transformer tablet but it was also half the price. I've added LXDE because ... well, it's poky. It's slow. I don't think my netbook can handle 12.10. If I could drop back to say 10 point something I think it would perform nicely. But I'm willing to put up with slow right now because my windows machine is a BRICK and I can't print anything, and I need to be able to print things for my work.

I've searched around looking for solutions. I run into a few barriers with this. They explain things at a level higher than my understanding, so the help isn't helping me because I don't have a firm grasp on the language.

so. Epson Stylus NX-330 Small in one? no usb connection. it is wireless only.

also. Acer A-100 netbook? no DVD or CD capability whatsoever. I used a cd to load the drivers on my windows machine; I cannot use that solution with my netbook.

I've seen this already. epson's page for printer drivers

I've gone to that page. I dont understand anything there. there's no explanation for anything. there are links for a ESC/P Driver (full feature), a ESC/P-R Driver (generic driver), a core package&data package, and a network plugin package. the first two are printer drivers; the second two are scanner drivers.

let's use just the ESC/P-R Driver (generic driver) as an example for now. I click the link that says "download" and it takes me here:

an incredibly long lists of all the printers these drivers support. I have no faith that this is true.

because I am a lazy person I just searched for NX330, and sure enough, it's in that huge list. I accept the agreement.

I then see


File name File size
epson-inkjet-printer-escpr-1.2.2-1lsb3.2.i486.rpm 1.43 MB
epson-inkjet-printer-escpr_1.2.2-1lsb3.2_i386.deb 1.73 MB
epson-inkjet-printer-escpr-1.2.2-1lsb3.2.x86_64.rpm 1.43 MB
epson-inkjet-printer-escpr_1.2.2-1lsb3.2_amd64.deb 1.73 MB
epson-inkjet-printer-escpr-1.2.2-1lsb3.2.src.rpm 1.38 MB
epson-inkjet-printer-escpr-1.2.2-1lsb3.2.tar.gz 1.45 MB

and I suppose i'm to download all of those, so I do.

THEN WHAT? they don't do anything! I click them, they do nothing. obviously i'm missing something that it's already assumed that I know, but I DON'T. and there's no easy way to find it out. I've been trying.

I've had an account here for years. I'm only on 25 posts. I hven't been using linux solidly in all that time, because every time i run into a problem like this I stop using linux and stick to what I know how to deal with. Windows may be frustrating but I've been using IBM machines since before windows was even a thing, so when something goes wrong I can often figure out how to even start looking for a solution just because my computer experience is saturated through years of exposure. but linux is just not that easy to learn, and so I've never spent a lot of time with it.

It's because I don't even have the most basic understanding, and while I know that I don't know, i don't know how to start knowing. I know that this is totally basic, and I'm stupid for not knowing it, but I don't know it, and I haven't been able to find a way to learn it.

[Athena's Owl]

All right. I have managed to install the .deb packages; that wound up being a simple matter of clicking on them twice *quickly* which is difficult on a netbook.

the .rpm files? still no luck figuring out how to open those. I checked to see if simply installing the .deb files would solve my problem but my printer is still not detected.

so I'm guessing I have to figure out how to install the .rpm files? I'm trying to look that up but I still haven't found a site that explains how without assuming a knowledge of linux language, which I still don't have.

ETA: I found this page which got me to install Alien and dpkg and dephelper, so I managed that

but the next step was to use alien to open a specific package name, which I painstakingly copied from the filename. but command line came back saying that the package didn't exist. what? am I doing wrong? is it like DOS where you have to "be" in the correct directory in order for alien to find the package? I assumed that wasn't so because I've merrily obeyed command line instructions just straight from opening a terminal, so I don't know what went wrong here.

ETA2: I just typed "Alien" in a terminal and it wants the switch -d and the command also has to be at root, so I tried

sudo alien -d epson-inkjet-printer-201105w-1.0.0-1lsb3.2.i486.rpm

and it still tells me File Not Found, even though I'm staring right at the file, and I copied the file name and pasted the exact file name into the command, so I still don't know what I could possibly be doing wrong. Seriously need help here.

[xc3RnbFO8P]

Ubuntu 12.10, did you install 64 bit or 32 bit?

[Athena's Owl]

OMG THANK YOU FOR REPLYING TO ME

i installed 64-bit.

[xc3RnbFO8P]

This is the package that you should install

epson-inkjet-printer-escpr_1.2.2-1lsb3.2_amd64.deb 1.73 MB

[xc3RnbFO8P]

and you should remove this package
epson-inkjet-printer-escpr_1.2.2-1lsb3.2_i386.deb

sudo dpkg -r epson-inkjet-printer-escpr_1.2.2-1lsb3.2_i386.deb