Craig said
escputil - maintenance utility for Epson Stylus printers
Package: escputil Source: gutenprint Version: 5.2.9-1 Description-en: maintenance utility for Epson Stylus printers escputil is a utility to clean and align the heads of Epson Stylus printers. It can also check the current ink levels in the printer. . Gutenprint is the print facility for the GIMP, and in addition a suite of drivers that may be used with common UNIX spooling systems using GhostScript or CUPS. These drivers provide printing quality for UNIX/Linux on a par with proprietary vendor-supplied drivers in many cases, and can be used for many of the most demanding printing tasks. Gutenprint was formerly known as Gimp-Print.
Given that the description mentions Gutenprint, I'd guess that it probably requires you to be using the printer-driver-gutenprint driver (as mentioned in my last post). if you're not already using it, you'd have to install it to get this to work.
This utilty will work without Gutenprint (it used to anyway, its been a while since I used it), it communicates directly with the port in which the printer is connected. I mainly use it to clean the print heads and to check the ink levels in an Stylus Photo R1800. It absolutely dirnks ink during the cleaning process. Lindsay