Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Using a Canon Pixma MX882 All-In-One with Ubuntu 10.10

Are you thinking about buying a Canon Pixma MX882 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer and wondering if it will work with your Ubuntu computer?  Although Canon does not make this clear in any way, the answer is YES!

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Instead of using software that comes on a CD with the printer, you'll have to download and install drivers yourself.  They are not easy to find if you live in the US since they're only available on European and Asian Canon websites.  I'll tell you how to download and install them.

Printing

Finding and installing the drivers

  1. Visit the Linux IJ Printer Driver page on the Canon Europe web site.
  2. Click the Linux IJ Printer Driver MX880 series.tar link in the Downloads section to download the 7299.5 kb tarball.
  3. Inside the tarball, find and unpack cnijfilter-mx880series-3.50-1-deb.tar.gz.
  4. Inside the resulting cnijfilter-mx880series-3.50-1-deb/packages directory, locate and double click cnijfilter-common_3.50-1_i386.deb and  cnijfilter-mx880series_3.50-1_i386.deb in that order.  Ubuntu will guide you through the installation. 
Note: The guide that came with this driver asks you to run the install.sh program, but it didn't work for me.  When I ran it, I got an error: An error occurred. The package management system cannot be identified.

Adding the printer

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

Scanning

Finding and installing the drivers

  1. Visit the Linux IJ Scanner Driver page on the Canon Europe web site.
  2. Click the Linux IJ Scanner Driver MX880 series.tar link in the Downloads section to download the 3072 kb tarball.
  3. Inside the tarball, find and unpack scangearmp-mx880series-1.70-1-deb.tar.gz.
  4. Inside the resulting scangearmp-mx880series-1.70-1-deb/packages directory, locate and double click scangearmp-common_1.70-1_i386.deb and  scangearmp-mx880series_1.70-1_i386.deb in that order.  Ubuntu will guide you through the installation. 
Note: The guide that came with this driver asks you to run the install.sh program, but it didn't work for me.  When I ran it, I got an error: An error occurred. The package management system cannot be identified.

    Scan Gear MP

    With the drivers, an app called Scan Gear MP is also installed.  This app serves as an interface to your scanner and has a Basic Mode:


    And an Advanced Mode:


    You can launch the app from the terminal by typing scangearmp and it is also available within Gimp by selecting FileCreate, Scan Gear MP...


    I have not yet figure out a way to use the scanner via XSane.  I'd love to hear comments about whether this is possible and how to do it.  Without XSane support, I can't use familiar programs such as SimpleScan and gscan2pdf.

    VueScan

    One more thing to mention.  Before I figured out Canon made drivers for this scanner, I came across a program called VueScan which claimed to support MX880 series printers on Linux via the network without installing any drivers at all.  It took seconds to download, launch, and see that this program could communicate with my MX882 scanner with ease!  It may be worth the $79.95 if you can't get Canon's drivers to work.

    Happy printing, scanning, copying, and faxing!