Epson Stylus DX4400 printer - proprietary driver

I have this old printer, it works with Gutenprint via CUPS on Slackware 15.0 64bit (multilib ready), yes it does work, but print quality seems poor and/or print speed really slow.

I'd like to try managing it with proprietary drivers, but seems there isn't anything easy to go out the box.
It is a multi function machine, but in this topic I prefer to focus on printing only (also the scanner doesn't work out of box, but I don't need it for now, maybe in an other topic I'll report any progress in detect it).

Starting from Epson website I found two packages:

• RPM package for Photo Image Print System for Linux (pips-3.0-1.src.rpm)
• Its User Manual released in 2006

Code:# rpm2tgz pips-3.0-1.src.rpm
# tar tvf pips-3.0.1.src.tgz

# tar tvf pips-3.0-1.src.tgz
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2024-09-02 21:57 ./
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2024-09-02 21:57 pips-3.0-1/
-rw-r--r-- root/root 54313 2007-09-18 07:15 pips-3.0-1/pips-Redhat9-3.0.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- root/root 856211 2007-10-11 08:08 pips-3.0-1/pips-common-3.0.tar.gz
-rw-r----- root/root 7397 2007-09-18 07:17 pips-3.0-1/pips-common.specI tried to build "pips-common-3.0.tar.gz" and make a Slackware package, but something goes wrong... and it returns error at "make".

Below, a piece of "spec file" with the simple build procedure, doesn't seem nothing exotic, but it doesn't work.
Configure seems OK, but make command returns error.

Code:./configure --prefix=/usr
make CFLAGS="-g -O2" CXXFLAGS="-g -O2"
make install-strip DESTDIR=${RPM_BUILD_ROOT}Maybe it requires some old library that is too recent at now after more than ten years... I don't know.

So I decided to ask around for some hint.
If anyone can suggest something to solve, would be really appreciated.

Thanks in advance!