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
- Download ondrej-zary's carps-cups source code (there's a zip file download link present)
- Extract it on the desired work-area folder (temporary use; mine was inside my home folder)
- Using the terminal, go to the location of the unzipped folder and run "make"
$ cd ~/carps-cups-master
$ make - 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. - If things look fine and there's no error, proceed with "sudo make install" (or make install for root users);
The Result$ sudo make install
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!
