****Canon printers, including the i560 now work out of the box with CUPS drivers.**** At least for regular printing. Have not tested photo printing yet.**** 2009-10-20


For all those poor soles out there with a Canon printer on Linux.

I myself own a Canon i560 and after using the BJC 7000, bjc7100 and bjc 8200 drivers I was unsatisfied with the quality outputs, expecially for photo printing.

I then tried the famous Turboprint evaluation drivers from www.turboprint.de and the quality was amazing in all aspect. My photos were perfect in GIMP 2.0.

But the Turboprint drivers are not free. They cost 35$ USD for a single license.That pissed me off and I did not want to pay for drivers witch are free on Windows. Everybody knows Canon does not support Linux, in North-America anyway.

So I researched my ass off on the Web and found out everything I could about printers in Linux and Canon.

I found the solution and I am going to share it with you.

1) Canon did create drivers for the i series printers, but in Japan! Here they are. In Japan my i560 is called a Pixus560i. (All the i series drivers are there and many others)

ftp://download.canon.jp/pub/driver/bj/linux/

For the i560 you need to download 2 files (I use Mandrake 10.1 but the source tar.gz are there too)

bjfiltercups-2.4-0.i386.rpm

bjfilterpixusXXXi-2.4-0.i386.rpm


Install bjfiltercups-2.4-0.i386.rpm

Then bjfilterpixusXXXi-2.4-0.i386.rpm. It might have a dependancy issue for libpng.so.2. If so look here http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3 for your Distro package of the libpng2 package. I installed libpng2-1.0.12-2.2mdk.i586.rpm.

After that bjfilterpixusXXXi-2.4-0.i386.rpm installed without a problem.

2) Reboot your system

3) go in your printer manager and look for your driver under Canon. It is called "Multipass Pixus XXXi"

Voila!

I tested it and its perfect. Great text and picture quality

I've tried this with Red Hat 9 and the rpms installed no problemo, but when I rebooted, the driver for my canon i560 where still not in the list... Any idea how this could happen? When I have more time I will upgrade this machine to fedora but for now I would just like this thing to print... I will try the drivers you suggested above, I don't really need to print any high quality photos urgently so this post has been of great help to me anyway :)

Could it be a dependency issue as you suggested? I didn't get any errors though; but maybe you know how I can check this anyhow?

[edit] OK, I've tried any of the three drivers above and the wizard leads me to a stage where he is saying "You are about to do create the following queue blablabla" then I hit apply and the thing doesn't respond... :s I can keep clicking apply, but nothing happens :((( [/edit]

A couple of extra things I had to do to make the drivers work correctly:

(mine is a i550 printer, but i assume they are one in the same as drivers go)

When I ran: bjfilterpixus550i (from command line) I got an error msg:
libtiff.so3 missing
ran apt-get install libtiff3g

then ran it again:
libpng.so.2 missing
ran apt-get install libpng2

Ran it one more time: Success..no errors

Tried printing...and it worked like a charm.

Hope that helps.

Has anyone succeeded in getting the source files from that site in japan to compile, because I haven`t. I`m still struggling with the bjc8200 driver

Q. Ruber

On Fedora 3 the compiler seems to think that the switch
statement in bjfilter-2.2-1/src/bjferror.c is dodgy.
But break added in there gets to to compile without any problems.

switch( err_code )
{
case FILE_ERROR:
fprintf( stderr, "file access Error!\n" );
break;
case MEMORY_ERROR:
fprintf( stderr, "memory allocate Error!\n" );
break;
default:
break;
}


I then found that even after a CUPS restart the Pixus drivers
were not listed in the GNOME printer wizard.
However it does work using the CUPS http interface

http://localhost:631/admin

Adding the printer through that works and I can print out the test page.
Top banana !!
I'm using an i550 though.

Cheers

Matt

I just use the BJC7000 driver on Mandrake 10.1 for my Canon Pixus 560i. (I'm in Japan, and I bought my printer here.) It comes out okay.

Thanks for your efforts!
I have an i960 that prints beautifully on Mac and
Windows (ugh) but had to use the 8200 drivers for less than satisfactory photo results in LINUX.
I used the CUPS 2.4 and filter990i downloads.
Installed fine. Works.

I bought this before I entered the linux world.
How I regret the false economy. Will buy HP next time.
Canon's attitude towards linux is appalling.