So, here I went again; Bought a new printer (and scanner) without doing the needed research first. Since it was a Canon I thought I'd be pretty safe; never had issues getting any Canon product working under Linux.

So I went and downloaded the cnijfilter 4.00-1 source package from Canon and tried to compile it; which did not work out of the blue (of course); So I went around and found a few missing things. Then stumbled on the work of Willysr on a previous version of this driver. Things seem to have changed a bit since then, so I took his Slackbuild script and tweaked a bit around to make it compile and install this new version.

Discovering the printer over wifi now finally works and I can see the printer. I added it with lpadmin and various other ways, but somehow cannot get beyond seeing the printer and telling it to print a self-test page. The other test page (cups) does make the led blink, so there is something sent to this printer. But nothing happens otherwise. Cups thinks all is fine and all went well, but in fact that's not really what my idea of a successful print would look like.

Setting Cups LogLevel to Debug2 does not seem to give much more information than that it appears that if I print from an application, nothing happens in the error log.

My idea is that something might be amiss with the PPD or something else might be the matter, but I have no clue as of yet. Anyone with a better brain than mine (could be anyone, really) with some suggestions on what I might try?

(thinking about upgrading Gutenprint 5.2.10 (as I'm on 5.2.9 yet) as this printer is listed on the site as a supported printer)

The specs:
- Slackware 14.0 multilib (ye, I know; should upgrade one day)
- Canon pixma printer MG3550
- cnijfilter from source version 4.00-1
-- patches:
-- added cups/ppd.h to one file to make it compile
-- for debugging purposes added library_path in the error print: fprintf(stderr, "ERROR: cannot load library(%d) [%s]\n", __LINE__,library_path);

Attached the slackbuild as I modified it from the script from Willysr. Changed the tag to mdg, to make sure I remember I altered this file, credits still go to Willysr.

Attached Files

cnijfilter.SlackBuild.txt (12.3 KB, 173 views)

A small heads-up: I noticed the printer supports LPR printing, so that's what I went with along with Gutenprint 5.2.10; It does work, although I do have to adjust colors as they're way too dark. All colors come out nearly black... Will see what I can do about that.

Next step is getting the scanner working with xsane...

You may be suffering the same thing I was with Debian: bad version of CUPS. The 1.5-version has a bug that causes problems with many Canon pixma-series printers. It was corrected in some 1.6 version, but 1.7 is safer bet. The bug should cause printer freezing after a couple of pages, though, but check it out. If you find a fix so that your printing starts fine, you may come across the bug.

I have MP140, and this far only Puppy and *buntus have worked. After (was it) Xubuntu Live it worked even with Mint 17 Live, but after installing Mint 17 it didn't work. Weird?
(http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ng-4175506130/)

Just for future reference?

I have a Canon Pixma iP6310D, bought because it was a Canon, they make Good Stuff and I needed a feed-through for printing postage and addresses on envelopes for large mailings and my H-P Business Inkjet 2280tn didn't handle envelopes without mangling more than a few.

It's a boat anchor. Zero support for Linux from Canon. Yeah, it'll work with Win7 in VirtualBox but, less than zero on the Linux side of the world (and I don't use Win7 for much more than Patch Tuesday and once a year for Tubrotax.

Yet another lesson learned during a wasted youth.

Hewlett-Packard gives away HPLIP (HP Linux Imaging and Printing). It's standard equipment in Slackware. It supports (fully) pretty much every printer they've ever made and they update it whenever a new printer is released. You plug in a printer, run hp-setup, it finds the printer (USB, Ethernet, whatever) and automagically configures CUPS for you. You plug in a different H-P printer and it finds and configures that, too without you doing anything, not one second of screwing around. It even comes with a duplex gadget and automatically prints on both sides of the paper.

A Photosmart C4680 got flaky (thing only cost $60) and it got replaced with a Officejet Pro 8600: print, scan, copy, fax. Ethernet, USB, built-in telephone interface. Two minutes total to get it up and running, another two minutes to set a fixed-IP address and all four servers are happy campers. The HPLIP Status Server (goes on the panel) lets you print, scan and copy (with the built in feeder), send a fax. Big ink cartridges (4 of 'em). The thing set itself up to use xsane! Are you kidding me?

Canon obviously doesn't like Linux. H-P does: any questions?

That Pixma? You pay the shipping and it's yours, lemme know.

Oh, yeah, that Business Inkjet 2280? It's about 15 years old, recently replaced the network interface card (for $10 off E-Bay). Still cranking.

1 members found this post helpful.

As an absolute rule, I NEVER EVER buy Canon products. They treat Linux badly, so they can just b*gger off. Stick to HP. Can't go wrong, unless it's a total USB-only bottom-of-the-range cheapie - might hit a few issues there.

2 members found this post helpful.

Using bjnp 1.2.2 along with gutenprint 5.2.10 gives me proper results; I can print just fine. Gutenprint was built taking the gutenprint slackbuild from slackware source, downloaded version 5.2.10 and moved 5.2.9 source elsewhere and voila it built just fine.

So, printing over the network goes fine; however I'm not getting the scanner to work; sane-find-scanner doesn't find the scanner, even when giving the url. Also scangearmp from Gimp doesn't find the scanner, although I built it from the source that Canon provided. Might have to dive a bit deeper into that, but after spending more than 20 hours on this apparatus making it work under Slackware I'm going to let it rest a while before spending more of my valuable time :-) Hope to update and close this thread soonish though.

tronayne: don't say that. I've only tried to get the friggin' pixma mp140 working for more than a year now:
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopi...106613#p714502

Precisely

cndrvcups common and cndrvcups ufrii are two drivers that will bring my mp4880dw canon to life on any Linux
of several different flavors. It is especially easy with Slackware just download the deb. files then use deb2tgz and install. Next click on the printer and send a test page and it just works.

Well, as it happens, to replace an old HP Officejet Pro K550 that died of old age, I just bought a Canon PIXMA MG3550 today and it works (both the printer and the scanner). Out of laziness I chose to use rpm2txz to make Slackare packages for the printer's and the scanner's drivers. End of output of ls -1tr /var/log/packages is shown below:I just had to make and install in addition a package for pangox-compat, to install a missing dependency (thanks Kikinovak for the info, by the way).

I can't say a thing either good or bad about that printer + scanner + copier, other than it works on Slackware 14.1 and all in all was not that difficult to install using drivers provided by Canon (supposed to be used on Fedora 18, but who cares :-)

Just use CUPS to set up the printer, or run /usr/local/bin/scangearpm to start the scanner's GUI (sorry, I was too lazy to change the prefix). I have still to find out usage of other binaries installed in /usr/local/bin.

EDIT. I'll expand the installation procedure.

Drivers can be found e.g. here.

Get the drivers:

• For the printer: MG3500 series IJ Printer Driver Ver. 4.00 for Linux (rpm Packagearchive)
• For the scanner: MG3500 series ScanGear MP Ver. 2.20 for Linux (rpm Packagearchive)

Unpack the downloaded tarballs:Make and install the Slackware packages (this is for 32 bit: for 64 bit, replace i386 with x86_64 below):Then install pangox-compat and restart the CUPS daemonEDIT2. xsane recognizes and monitors the scanner without a hitch. So you've a choice: either use it or Canon's own application. Now let's try OCR.

EDIT3. I tried gocr and cuneiform (both available @ http://slackbuilds.org). Results are way better with cuneiform. I'll try tesseract tomorrow.

EDIT4. tesseract is also good at characters recognition, but for the only document I tried cuneiform better respect the formatting (including e.g. bold and alignment) and also proposes more output formats. So this will be my application of choice for OCR.

5 members found this post helpful.

Thanks Didier! If I could give 10 votes for 1 post I would; splendid explanation, just perfect. A complete step-by-step guide! Pure awesomeness. It's that I have to pay a visit to my parents in law tonight, otherwise I'd have it running :-) I'll give this the shot it deserves and mark as solved if it really is. :-)

Nice, but if I were you I'd first make sure that the procedure works...

If you are satisfied, instead and assuming from your location that you speak Dutch, maybe you could consider joining slint's Dutch translation team, see http://slint.fr/en/contribute.html, (yes, I'm opportunist at times :-)

Maybe I should try something similar with my pixma MP140.
Can't use CUPS 1.5 though.

In my case (and some others) in addition to lost 1/2 of the last page, the printer freezes totally.

I'm going to give it a look; it's at least interesting and nice to be of some help somewhere... That being said: I expect Dutch people not to be very interested in a translated system, due to an artificial feel we get with such systems. Games that are translated failed for the dutch translation... we prefer english for some silly reason... Frankly, I'll try to help with translations but I think I'll stick with my english Slackware ;-)

Hmm.. Did you actually tried on Slackware-14.1? I ask this because I see that in the SlackBuild: