Getting a Canon MP620 working with Ubuntu 8.04 x86_64

Not quite as straight forward as it should be from Ubuntu land. Following on from this other blog...

First job is to get it on the wireless network, I had to use winxp and the bundled client to poke the right values in the printer for WEP config. Printing from XP was flawless, naturally.

For Ubuntu printing, we need to build cups-bjnp but with 8.04 there is a snag. Just doing:

apt-get install libcupsys2-dev

.. results in all dependencies bar 1 file, 'sidechannel.h', which can be extracted from upstream 1.3.8 (cups/sidechannel.h) and copied into /usr/include/cups.

Making cups-bjnp was straight forward 'make', followed by 'make install' which adds 'bjnp' as a printer back-end in cups.

In the Printer Configuration wizard, setting up the MP620 was just a case of selecting the Canon610 being the closest relative, and adding the IP address of the printer.

The next stumble was finding test pages would be processed by the printer but never printed. This was simply a useless default setting for media source, picking 'automatic paper source switching' fixed that, and prints come forth.

If printing doesn't start almost immediately, the paper source/sizes are probably incorrect, check print options in the application used to print.

Close but no cigar, so far. I can print to the MP620 but test pages come out 'split' with almost 1 for 1 white lines horizontally, cutting off an A4 print at just after the Magenta text. Plain text prints suffer the same issues. Gah, its like looking at an ancient green screen Commodore PET! Its not the printer, can print XP test pages fine, can copy XP test pages fine. CUPS and/or printer settings not quiet right. Will post more details when I figure it out.