Printing with a Canon is a blast

Recently a friend bought a Canon multifunction Pixma MP630 printer and wanted to get it working on Ubuntu Jaunty (Debian should work the same). To my surprise, Canon are making Linux drivers available on their website.

It’s not well spelled out on the site but there are 4 packages that you need and they need to be installed in a specific order. The first two relate to the printer itself, the second two are for the scanning component. Both are i386 packages (but probably work in 64bit as they aren’t actually architecture specific).

First, download the “common” packages called, “IJ Printer Driver Ver. 3.00 for Linux (debian Common package)” and “ScanGear MP Ver. 1.20 for Linux(debian Common package)“. These contains the backend components.

Secondly download the actual driver for that model MP630, “IJ Printer Driver Ver. 3.00 for Linux (debian Package for MP630series)” and “ScanGear MP Ver. 1.20 for Linux(debian Package for MP630series)“.

Now, install the first “common” packages and it will fail because it needs some dependencies. These dependencies are in the tree so running sudo apt-get -f install will fix it. Installing the specific printer drivers will fail because they require the common packages first, which is why they are installed second.

Next, install the two specific drivers. All dependencies should be met and it should proceed smoothly.

Restart CUPS and plug in the printer. When you do, Ubuntu should just automatically detect it and configure it.

When I did this previously apparmor was blocking the backend. It doesn’t appear to in Jaunty, but if you have problems, this is how I removed cups from apparmor.

apt-get install apparmor-profiles
ln -s /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.cupsd /etc/apparmor.d/disable/
apparmor_parser -R /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.cupsd
/etc/init.d/cups restart

Once you’ve done all that, everything should be sweet. Print a test page!

2 thoughts on “Printing with a Canon is a blast

  1. Chris I followed your instructions (but not the last bit about removing cups from apparmor) and my mp630 is printing fine. However, I cannot find how to get it to scan. I am running Ubuntu 9.04 and Xsane detects my WIN Nova TV card not my mp630. I cannot find a ‘scangear’ application either. Any suggestions,? Thanks Steve.

  2. Hey Steve,

    Hmmm.. did it install a SANE driver? It’s probably under /usr/lib/share/sane or something. Open the deb package in the archiver rather than package manager and you should be able to browse the data tarball. The other thought is maybe Apparmor is blocking it and needs to be set to complain mode?

    sudo aa-complain /path/to/sane

    -c

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