Installing old Canon MP190 driver

aguador · 04-18-2019, 03:30 PM

I've read a couple of treads on old Canon drivers and may have got further than most, but I still have a problem and a couple of questions.

I recently rescued an Vista OS laptop for a elderly friend by installing MX Linux and setting it up to be easy to use basic functions. While the OS and laptop are fine, the old printer with 2008 drivers is another issue. Part of the problem is installing a 386 driver on a 64-bit system.

Thanks to a blog post (and some learning, as I am more used to rpm systems) I changed a dependency in the driver's control file from libcupsys2 to libcups2. Thanks further to the dpkg -s option I have been able to do some dry runs and can get the "common" parts of the printer and scanner drivers installed.

The problem comes with the libatk1.0-0:i386 dependency which requires libglib2.0-0:i386. Checking this I get (excluding the list of packages to be eliminated):

Code:

sudo apt-get install -s libatk1.0-0:i386 libglib2.0-0:i386
Leyendo lista de paquetes... Hecho
Creando árbol de dependencias       
Leyendo la información de estado... Hecho
Los paquetes indicados a continuación se instalaron de forma automática y ya no son necesarios.
. . . . .
Se instalarán los siguientes paquetes NUEVOS:
  docbook-xsl foomatic-filters libatk1.0-0:i386 libblkid1:i386 libffi6:i386 libglib2.0-0:i386
  libmount1:i386 libpcre3:i386 libselinux1:i386 libuuid1:i386 libxml2-utils systemd-sysv xterm
  zlib1g:i386
0 actualizados, 14 nuevos se instalarán, 572 para eliminar y 0 no actualizados.

The problem is the threat to eliminate the greater part of my installed system. My question is what is the best way to proceed?

Is there a way to install while blocking removal of the other files?

Is there a way of identifying the conflicts and eliminating them before the install?

I am doing this on a fresh installation of MX Linux on one of my machines, so if I bork the system, there is no problem. That means I could experiment further, but I know there are more knowledgeable folks than I here who might save me some pain.

Stéphane Ascoët · 04-19-2019, 03:34 AM

I prefer aptitude than apt-get, it gives more details about what it's doing and why.

business_kid · 04-20-2019, 04:41 AM

You may have another option.
Ghostscript is actually the printing engine. With 'man gs' open on one terminal, you can throw up a line of options to print a page. Ghostscript outputs ps or pdf but between a2ps and ghostscript I managed to avoid cups altogether.

Look at the output of 'gs -h.' It throws up a list of drivers (internal ghostscript ones) and they're not terribly fussy. I used the bjc600 driver for my bjc4000 printer of the time. To use a 32 bit lib in a 64bit system is less than straightforward, as you need 32 bit glibc support (e.g. /lib/ld-linux.so) minimum, and that's probably a 64 bit lib :-/. So you'll have to figure your way out of that naming problem. I'd try and talk him into a new printer rather than do that to myself.

Slackware uses /lib64 and /usr/lib64 for 64bit libs, avoiding that issue. It does offer a full 64bit multilib system.