Adding Canon Pixma MX860 to Ubuntu 14.04

Question

I have a Canon Pixma MX680 all-in-one hard-wired to my LAN.

Trying to add a printer using Settings | Printer | Add Printer | Network Printer gave me a whole bunch of choices--Find Network Printer, AppSocket/HP Jetdirect, ipp, https, ipp14, and so on. I tried to use "Find Network Printer" using my printer's IP address (no hits), then its MAC address (changing the usual colon separators to the apparently-Ubuntu-standard hyphens), and it seemed to find the printer, and I chose the driver from the list, and it showed up in the Printers box, but I couldn't print a test page.

I removed the printer and tried this approach from the command line. It seemed to work, and again the printer shows up in the Printers box. Still, I'm unable to print a test page. Looking at Properties | Settings, I see that Printer State is "Processing - printer not responding; will retry," then going back to "Processing." Print queue shows my test pages lined up (and I deleted them--or cancelled?--what's the difference?).

As suggested by that page, I installed XSane, which was able to find the printer's scanner and scan successfully.

So, it doesn't seem that it ought to be a big step to get the printer going--eh?

Any help gratefully received. If an answer requires undoing what I did, please let me know how to do that. If it requires typing things into terminal mode, I'd very much appreciate an explanation of what the lines do (I've been working with computers a long time, but I'm completely new to Linux). Many thanks.

Answer 1

I simply installed the cups-backend-bjnp package in the Ubuntu 14.04 repository to find my MX850 after upgrading from 12.04.

sudo apt-get install cups-backend-bjnp

Answer 2

For my Canon MX850 I followed these instructions with the following tweaks:

• Inside the cnijfilter-mx880series-3.50-1-deb/packages directory, locate and double click (in this order)

  1. cnijfilter-common_3.50-1_i386.deb
  2. cnijfilter-mx880series_3.50-1_i386.deb

  Ubuntu will guide you through the installation using the software center.

• Now run the install.sh program. It will not find the MX880 but will find the MX850. Install it instead.

  If install.sh does not work, try this:

  • From Ubuntu's menu, select: System, Administration, then Printing.
  • From Printing window that opens, select Add.
  • After a few seconds, you should see a Canon MX880 printer show up under Network Printer.
  • Select it and click Forward.
  • Finish entering your printer Name, Description, and Location.

  On 2 of my PCs the install.sh did not work, on one it did.

Answer 3

I just recently worked through this as follows:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:michael-gruz/canon-trunk
sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install cnijfilter-common cnijfilter-mx860series

Next, you'll need to update AppArmor to let cups send signals by adding the following to /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.cupsd. After the lines

  network econet dgram,
  network ash dgram,

add this:

  signal,

Next, restart AppArmor to pick up the changes:

sudo service apparmor restart

Now you should be able to go into Printers -> Add -> Network printer, and add your printer.