I'm running the 64-bit version of Slackware 14.1. I recently purchased a Canon MF244dw laser printer after confirming a linux driver for it was available from Canon.
I downloaded this driver's tar file. I untarred it into a directory owned by root. I converted the 64-bit rpm files to tar files using rpm2tar.gz. That worked. I used tar to unpack and install the packaged files. That worked.
CUPS found the printer.
I tried printing to it. All I get is a page with the message: Unable to open initial device, quitting.
Searching for reports of this problem turned up solutions that said that some 32-bit libraries were needed. Really? On a 64-bit system?
Can anybody give me some clarifcation of what's going on here? Anybody running 64-bit Slackware successfully installed this printer?
Here's my solution to this problem:
Not without a lot of trepidation, I downloaded and installed the multilib package per the instructions. Here are all the commands I used (running as root and starting in root's home directory):
cd
lftp -c 'open
http://slackware.com/~alien/multilib/ ; mirror -c -e 14.1'
cd 14.1
upgradepkg --reinstall --install-new *.t?z
upgradepkg --install-new slackware64-compat32/*-compat32/*.t?z
They're right out of the multilib documentation. I ran them one at a time too make sure everything went right. Per the instructions, I rebooted to pick up the glibc upgrade. It turns out that's all I needed to do.
I ran some tests and confirmed to my satisfaction it can print ASCII text, Postscript, PDF, JPEG and png files. It also has no problem printing my LibreOffice documents.
Kudos to the folks who created and maintain the multilib package.
