Canon printer drivers

Tips, Tricks and Tutorials Tried & Tested
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For direct downloads from Canon, go here as Asians (afaik) are big time Linux users!:

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

Also a good source of drivers:

http://supportdrivers.info/category/canon-drivers/

See the following also but I don't know if it works as I don't have a Canon printer:

http://ubuntuportal.com/2011/12/how-to-install-canon-printer-driver-for-linux-ubuntu.html

Hope it helps someone!. :smiley:

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Half of those canon drivers do not work without considerable messing around with various dependancies. This should be made clear otherwise someone might be inclined to buy a canon printer for their linux system on the back of thinking that canon ostensibly provides linux drivers for them.

I say all of the above on the back of several bad experiences with canon printers and linux machines on both my own machine and helping out with those of others. When my canon LBP2900i finally dies, I will never buy another canon printer to go with linux.

Trouble is, the damn thing is so well built, I might be waiting years!

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Hi Steve,

I would agree that in the past the Canon printer drivers were a problem, most of the newer printers however are well supported by Canon Asia which is what I recommend to any Canon printer owner.

I also had a Canon printer many moons ago and could not get it to work with any Linux OS, I went for HP and haven’t looked back since!. :smiley:

I have helped people with Canon printers in fact quite recently and using the Canon Asia website, was able to direct them to the driver package they required!. :smiley:

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Canon Europe also has a good site:
http://www.canon-europe.com/support/software/linux/

Sure dependencies sometimes are a problem, but if a user is going to install firmware/drivers themselves, I will assume they know what they are doing. Otherwise go HP, they have better support out of the box than Canon do.

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For cannon printers (including multifunction devices), I’ve had the best results using this ppa:

https://launchpad.net/~inameiname/+archive/ubuntu/stable

A lot of the cannon drivers are a pig to compile on 14.04 64bit because of legacy 32bit dependencies (and the deprecated ia32-libs). This ppa however takes care a lot of dependencies and has worked very well on the Cannon devices I’ve had to install and configure.

While I’m talking about printers, one the best supported manufacters is Kyocera. They’re mostly known for the enterprise and thus have very good Linux and Cups support; they also provide the same level of Linux support for their consumer printers. I personally use and recommend them above any other manufacturer and being a professional writer, printing is important to me!

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Canon printers are the bane of my life. I use a Canon LBP2900i laser printer and it has not worked properly on any Debian based distro since Ubuntu 12.04LTS. I now do all of my work on Linux, but then start up an XP VM with Libreoffice etc installed in it and then print to my Canon printer from there.

Although not ideal, a VM will solve any printing problem vis a vis incompatibilities with Linux Once you’ve set it up, it is only a matter of a few second to fire up the VM, locate the relevant file in a shared folder and send it to the printer.

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Brother printers work great under Linux with drivers downloadable direct from the manufacturer conveniently packaged as .Deb’s.