Thursday, July 24, 2014

Linux Driver for Canon ImageClass MF3110/3112

I recently stumbled upon a treasure trove while looking for ways to make my old Canon ImageClass MF3112 all-in-one laser printer work with the latest OS around.

Background of the situation

If you're looking for drivers of this printer at the Canon official website, it only provides drivers to support 32-bit Windows XP, Vista and 7... none for Linux nor MacOS. This is pretty much a bummer especially if you have up-to-date workstations that "need" 64-bit OS (the > 4GB RAM thing). In my case, all my workstations and laptops run a Windows 8.1 and an Ubuntu Gnome 14.04, both 64-bit.

Canon actually published a package to install printer drivers for Linux-based OS, called the "UFR II". However, this is only for their not-so-late models, and apparently the one I need is the one they developed prior to this. The older models seem to be an implementation based on a raster-like format that I have no particular clue how it differs.

After a day of two of digging around the Internet, and exploring the vast "Page 2 and 3" Google search results, I found a guy who made a custom linux driver to support this "rastertocups" print driver thing that Canon has done and left to rot. He has a GitHub repo page which sort of discussed what the driver is and what other canon printer models are supported.

Since there's no HowTo wiki entry to use his codes, I opted to share what I did in order to use and install it (credits to ondrej-zary for the source code).

Pre-work Requirements
  • sudo rights (or root)
  • gcc and compiler (e.g. make, build-essential) is installed
  • cups, libcups2-dev, and libcupsimage2-dev is installed
  • even though it doesn't have the required drivers, I installed the UFR II Canon Linux Drivers because it seems that it is needed for the custom drivers to work
The Steps
  1. Download ondrej-zary's carps-cups source code (there's a zip file download link present)
  2. Extract it on the desired work-area folder (temporary use; mine was inside my home folder)
  3. Using the terminal, go to the location of the unzipped folder and run "make" 
    $ cd ~/carps-cups-master 
    $ make 

  4. If there are errors of missing dependencies, you can try to use "apt-file search " to check which packages you need install before trying to make it.
  5. If things look fine and there's no error, proceed with "sudo make install" (or make install for root users);
$ sudo make install
The Result

I've done this and made my printer work with Ubuntu Gnome 14.04 64-bit (cups 1.7.2) and Debian 7 Wheezy 32-bit (cups 1.5.3). I added printer and selected the compiled driver via the cups web interface (usually running at your linux machine "localhost:631").



Hope this helps somebody out there... and again a huge thanks to ondrej-zary!

20 comments:

  1. Hi. Thank you for this great tutorial! It really helped to get started with my MF 3110.

    To simplify installation on Ubuntu I've made a PPA:

    So now it is just a matter of running these commands:

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:madkinder/carps-cups
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install printer-driver-carps

    For now the packages are built only for Trusty. Feel free to contact me if you need other Ubuntu versions.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you a lot!
      Now I can live with my (not so old) MF3110 and enjoy life :)

      Be lucky and happy.

      Delete
    2. Hello, i need packages for KDE Linux...can you help me with this?

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    3. It doesn't matter what desktop environment you use (GNOME, KDE, XFCE, whatever) for these packages to work.

      Given you are on Ubuntu Trusty (14.04) just follow those three commands I posted above and that should do it. You don't even need a compiler.

      Delete
    4. I have Linux KDE.These commands will help me with the installation MF3110 Linus KDE?

      Delete
  2. Also it turns out that "UFR II Canon Linux Drivers" are not needed, Ondrej's driver is sufficient.

    Unfortunately my MF 3110 is very unstable with it: it works flawlessly after you plug printer in and add it to CUPS; but after reboot it doesn't work anymore.

    The instructions in the repo's README suggesting to use usblp file uri didn't help. Any help would be appreciated very much.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hello,
    Your post is very helpful. Now I need not to call my tech person to get fix my Canon printers. Thanks for sharing.Keep in touch. Canon ImageClass MF3110/3112 is one of the best Canon printers in India.

    ReplyDelete
  4. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hello!
    Thanks a lot ! Instruction is very simple and helpfull. All went ok, mf3110 works well (Ubuntu 12.4) though there was some errors/warnings during the compile process.
    You've made my day, especially after "throw out this junk" solutions from our tech guys =)

    ReplyDelete
  6. nice works like a charm just make sure that you have all the requirements

    ReplyDelete
  7. Hello...pls can you help me? i try to install craps-cups, but i see this errors...pls help!!! [root@reklama-6 carps-cups-master]# make install
    gcc -Wall -Wextra --std=c99 -O2 rastertocarps.c -o rastertocarps -lcupsimage -lcups
    /usr/bin/i586-alt-linux-gcc: No such file or directory
    make: *** [rastertocarps] Ошибка 1
    [root@reklama-6 carps-cups-master]# sudo make install
    root is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. you can try Madkinder's solution (check his comment) as he has compiled a package that already does most of the dirty-work to install the driver

      Delete
    2. ok, i'll try to making like this. thx

      Delete
  8. Hello and thank you for this post. I, like the rest of everyone here, just want to save a bit of money and utilize an existing printer. Although in my search for a solution, I have come to realize how unique Canon printers are in the way of making them work with Linux.

    I also realize that Fedora and Ubuntu are quite different animals, but I wonder if anyone can help with a code error.

    I ran 'make', and before it could even get going I got this error:

    carps-decode.c: In function ‘decode_print_data’:
    carps-decode.c:319:10: warning: format ‘%x’ expects argument of type ‘unsigned int’, but argument 7 has type ‘long int’ [-Wformat=]
    printf("out_pos: 0x%x, line_num=%d, line_pos=%d (%d), len=%d, in_pos=0x%x ",
    ^
    gcc -Wall -Wextra --std=c99 -O2 rastertocarps.c -o rastertocarps -lcupsimage -lcups
    ppdc carps.drv

    Now, I am certainly no programmer, and on a scale of one to ten, ten being a Linux guru and one being "Oh look, Penguins! How cute!", I'm a three or four at best.

    Any help would be very appreciated.

    ReplyDelete
  9. THX a lot! Canon MF 3110 worx on ubuntu 16.04, 32 bit

    ReplyDelete
  10. Hello Madkinder, is there a a way to create version for Xenial? THX

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Done. Updated and rebuilt the package for both Trusty and Xenial.

      Delete
  11. Hi Armand,
    Thkn you for very nice article. I jost come around to find the solution for one of my Canon printers.

    Unfortunately i see that it is not good for a MF3200 series printer. Can you tell me if it is possible somehow to change and have the driver for a MF3200 Series printers ?

    Thank you in advance.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi!

      Sadly I'm not the original author of the source code/custom drivers. I think the MF3200 is also one of those printers that uses that raster protocol of sorts. Maybe you can reach out to the original author via his github account.

      Cheers and good luck!

      Delete