Epson C-88 quit working

[brian]

Hi,
Installed a new Epson C-88 and it worked fine for about a week, although certain test and maintainance tools seemed cranky. About 3 days ago, the red light on the left hand button started to blink, which I think was a warning that one or more of the ink cartidges was running low. So, I went to the Toolbox, and clicked "Check ink Quantity", to see if ink level was the problem. I get error message saying, "No access to printer port. Use root login to get ink status"
Needed to use the printer so kept going, and after a few more pages, printer stopped printing. I logged in as root, went to tpsetup, and saw that printer has stopped, as indicated by the green "started" (running) indicator turning red. As "root" I check ink quantity, and get a new error message: "Printer not found" "Printer busy/not connected/switched off".
Am running Fedora Core 1, and have C-88 on USB, as it is supposed to be faster.
How can I get "Check ink Quantity" utility to tell me which cartridge is low? Assuming that is the problem, I don't want to throw away 3 perfectly good cartridges just to replace the right one.
Regards, BL.
Any chance that switching to parallel port would solve the problem? Or is this a lost cause to get level indicator working?

[zedonet]

Hello,

the problem is that as soon as the ink cartridge is empty the printer doesn't accept the ink query command (there may be some workaround used by Epson for their drivers but this is not known to us).

However, if you press the button on the printer with the "ink drop" symbol, the printer will position the print head so that you can see which ink is empty - the empty cartridge is placed next to the symbol "ink drop striked through".

When you press the button a second time, the print head is moved to exchange position.

PS: if you need to get a new cartridge first, press the button a third time and the print head will return to park position.

[brian]

I changed out the cartridge using your method, hit the restart checkbox, and Printer took off perfectly. Thanks.
I suspect this information may be in the owners manual, and yes, I DO read my manuals. Was about half way through this one, page for page, when I misplaced it. Thanks for covering even guys who lose their manuals.
Regards,
BL