I went out and picked up an Epson Stylus Photo R200 printer the other day when buying a new pack of DVD-R after deciding it might be nice to print to dvd's instead of writing on them. The printer was very cheap and a quick look up on the net I found people were using it sucessfully in linux. After getting it home and hooking it up I set it up in CUPS and printed a quick test page without any problems. However, printing to cd/dvd's was a little more trouble, and so I thought I'd outline what I had to do as I wasn't able to find any specific information on what is required.

First, I'm running Debian Sarge on my system. Using the gimpprint drivers that come with sarge you can't do the cd printing (at least I couldn't find a way). So I downloaded the newest development drivers from sourceforge.net. I downloaded the latest gutenprint-5.0 beta drivers (beta 4 at the time), and untared them. In order to compile the drivers I needed to install a few development packages in debian as well. The following command should do the trick:

apt-get install libcupsys2-dev libcupsimage2-dev libgimp2.0-dev libreadline5-dev libijs-dev debhelper xlibs-dev zlib1g-dev flex gettext foomatic-db-engine chrpath

After that simply enter the source directory and run ./configure then make then make install and if everything goes without errors you should have the newest drivers. At this point, restart CUPS (/etc/init.d/cupsys restart) and then setup your printer through the CUPS administration page (http://localhost:631/). When selecting the Model/Driver for your printer, choose the "EPSON Stylus Photo R200 - CUPS+Gutenprint v5.0.0-beta4 (en)" driver. Now that the printer is setup with that driver you will have the ability to select the CD tray for paper source.

If your using The Gimp creating an image to print on the CD is quite easy (I'm using the gimp 2.2.6 which is in debian stable (sarge). Simply go to file new, and from the template dropdown select "CD cover". Create the text/image you want on the cd/dvd (remember a cd is round, and so text in the corners of the template will not be printed obviously). Go to file->print, and select "Print to CD" for the Media Source, and if your cd/dvd is hub printable, select "Print to Hub" for the CD Hub Size (that is the center of the cd/dvd isn't clear and can be printed to). For the paper size choose "CD - 5 inch" and then you should be set. Load the cd/dvd into the tray, insert into the printer and click print.

posted at: 13:14 | path: /debian | permanent link to this entry