Antler

Rudolf 0 - Canon 1 · Saturday August 5, 2006 by Rudolf Vavruch

Update 06/08/09: As I gave up I found a solution, more details on the Ubuntu Forums.

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Canon, you have humbled me, crushed me like the insignificant consumer that I am.

For the past month or so I have been struggling to get a Canon printer to work on Ubuntu Dapper.

The fiend is a Canon LBP 2900 and it is very determined not to do anything remotely similar to what my parents bought it for.

I am not the only one struggling with this range of printers, many people on the Ubuntu forums are struggling too.

In order to get some closure I decided that, instead of the entry describing how I got it to work I was planning, I would post an entry describing everything I tried in order to con it into printing.

• I downloaded the rpmed drivers Canon provides, aliened them into debs, and followed their instructions. Later I made up my own instructions.
• I emailed Canon and received a short curt answer that they do not support GNU/Linux. Which was - unbelievably helpful. Seriously though, thanks. Next time I need something heavy to drag a sack of kittens to the bottom of a river with I know where to go. Fascinatingly a few days later I received an email asking me to fill in a form rating their support service.
• I found, badly Google translated and followed French instructions for the previous set of drivers on Breezy. These were based on English instructions for Debian. Unfortunately the previous drivers are nowhere to be found, perhaps they might have worked?
• Even though the printer was not listed I tried Turbo Print.
• I discovered a Japanese site that provided a special GhostScript used by the Canon drivers. Parts of the site were in English, but of course the Debian page was only in Japanese. Google balked at the idea of translating anything, so I had only the code samples to go by. I setup some new repositories and installed stuff I had not before. I wondered whether the Japanese text was laughing at stupid gaijin trying to get their printers to work.
• Finally I installed vmware-player to run Fedora Core 4. If it had worked I was going to post an entry proclaiming how ridiculous the solution was. It is ridiculous, but it did not work.

The last effort made me wonder if the problem did not lie with printer itself. I will take the printer to my office and see if I cannot convince it to work with Windows XP.

Finally I posted a bug on Launchpad. Perhaps the smarter Ubuntu people will be able to do something about it.