I have been given this printer and don't know all its history, but I know my friend was only getting rid of it because it had stopped printing a couple of colours. Giving the print head a good wash solved that issue - as per this you tube video.

Now the printer works fine if I print from the rear tray, but attempting to print from the cassette just results in a series of clanks and clicks, mainly from the rear tray mechanism, followed by the alarm lamp flashing Two (2) flashes, which means "Printer is out of paper./Paper does not feed."

The only result returned by Dr. Google was on the Linux Mint forum. As the only response was his own, saying "No idea how it happened but the printer seems to be working now. So problem solved", it really didn't help. "8-[ However, he said the printer had been working fine under Windows and that is also the report from my friend.

Could there possibly be a problem with the CUPS driver for this beast? CUPS reports: Canon iP4600 series - CUPS+Gutenprint v5.2.11

Any help will be gratefully accepted.

It may have to do with the PPD file associated with the gutenprint driver. You may well get a better result using the Canon proprietary driver...

http://support-asia.canon-asia.com/?personal

From there, I managed to navigate to find Linux drivers for iP4680 which eventually turned up these .deb packages

cnijfilter-common_3.00-1.i386.deb
cnijfilter-ip4600series_3.00-1.i386.deb

Now they are 32-bit packages, (and that reflects their age), but provided the dependencies are met they should still work in a 64-bit CUPS environment (provided the underlying libraries are there). The main thing is installing via the package manager.

Just for further clarification, I found this Ubuntu thread which asked about installing 32-bit Canon drivers in a 65-bit OS, and it was mentioned that prior to installing the driver packages the following is required
I'm not using a Debian-based Linux, and I haven't had to worry about installing 32-bit CUPS driver packages in a 64-bit environment for a long time, but hopefully the above will do the trick. YMMV.

Doh! Now I see that your distribution is actually Fedora? It was your reference to Mint in the opening post that set me on the DEB path. Anyway, try installing the 32-bit RPM packages via your package manager, and hopefully it will drag in the necessary.

1 members found this post helpful.

Brilliant! Thanks very much for your help ferrari. I will go and try it right now.
Kind regards,
Doug

Hmmm ... it looks as though it needs libcups, which is no longer available - not surprising, since the Canon drivers have not been updated since Nov 2008. It looks as though that is going to be a show-stopper, unless I can coerce some other library to look like libcups - chuckle!
Never mind: it was a good try. I'll just presevere with Gutenprint drivers and forget the cassette in my printer.

Thanks for your help.

Aaaaaaaarrrgh! Computers will drive me totally nuts! I just had to print a page, so I stacked paper in the rear tray. Yes, you guessed it - the printer picked up the paper from the cassette! I have no idea what I did, but it now works fine. Quick: hand me my pills ...

Sometimes there's no rhyme or reason it seems...but glad it's now working for you!

BTW, using a package manager (eg yum) is generally preferred over the rpm command to handle dependencies, conflict resolution etc

The package required for Fedora is 'cups-libs'....so something like the following required to install it
For the other dependency listed...

1 members found this post helpful.

I quite agree. I use dnf exclusively, except for this one occasion when I wanted to se what would happen.

Thanks for the suggestions about the libraries: I may try to install the Canon drivers, because the printer is playing silly games again. If I print, say, this page from Firefox, all works as expected; if I print from Scribus all I get is a blank sheet fed with much print head activity; if I print from a PDF, the activity light on the printer flashes and CUPS thinks the print has been successful, but nothing actually happens.

Doncha love computers? "8-[

Hi ferrari.
Your suggestion has taken me further, but as soon as I solve one issue, I hit another.

I used this command:That worked fine, up to a point. dnf found the relevant packages and dependencies and offered to install them, but fell over due to installed file conflicts. This is the relevant output:
I imagine I can solve this issue by unpacking the .rpm, removing the offending documentation files and repackaging the .rpm, but I would have to learn all about fiddling with rpms in order to do that. Is there an easier way of omitting the doc files from the installation?

Every day I learn a little more, whether I want to or not ... "8-)

I'm not familiar with using dnf... hopefully someone who is can advise further, but a quick google led me to some advice about this kind of issue
https://andrewwippler.com/2016/02/08...r-with-dnfyum/

dnf is just a fancy upgrade to yum, AFAIK.

Thanks for persisting with this for me - I appreciate the help. I'll take it from here.

Kind regards,
Doug