Monday, March 7, 2011

Installing a Canon Pixma MP250

I recently acquired a Pixma MP 250 printer, and as I had some difficulties with setting it up, I wanted to share this here. The printer isn't supported as such by CUPS, so I had to dig a little bit. After quite some time, I found debian packages on the Canon website there. Don't fear the mention of i386, amd64 packages are included too. This link is likely to break when the software is upgraded, you should try your luck in the drivers search page should that happen (or for other models). After installing that, CUPS find the connected printer and proposes the PPD for it. The scanner works out of the box with xsane

As a side note, Canon also provides source for the debian packages (the packaged was ITPed ages ago). However, there are some binary-only blobs and I didn't manage to get it to compile from source.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I was going through the same fun yesterday for a Pixma MP240, except in this case there are no amd64 packages provided. Again, the source doesn't build, but probably would only ever build on i386 anyway (not just because of the control file declarations).

After some fiddling and skimming through search results, I gave up trying to get printing working directly from the powerpc where I'd been asked to set it up, but found that force-installing the i386 packages on amd64 gave working printing.