Canon Pixma MP560 printer and Linux

When I bought this printer, I failed to find any Linux drivers for it. I must admit I didn't try hard to find them either since I was very much in a hurry at that time. Since then I had just assumed that drivers for Linux just don't exist.

But today I decided to search/try harder to get it working against my fedora laptop. The result was that I found the drivers very easily and after several minutes of efforts, I finally got it working! So I thought it blog about it and provide some pointers so process gets easier for others:

  1. Ensure you have 'DefaultLanguage en_GB' line in your /etc/cups/cupsd.conf and your firewall isn't blocking Port 8611 for TCP/UDP.
  2. Get the drivers from here. The drivers are available as rpm and deb packages.
  3. Once you have the packages downloaded and installed on your system, find out the mac address of your printer somehow. The method I used was to watch for packets in wireshark and pinging the broadcast address of the network.
  4. Once you have the mac address, Run this command as root:

    /usr/sbin/lpadmin -p MP560LAN -m canonmp560.ppd -v cnijnet:/${MAC_ADDRESS} -E

    Note that mac address bytes must be separated by '-' here rather than ':'.
  5. Your printer should now be installed and working!

Comments

Greg said…
For deb based distros - the deb package comes with an install script. No need to find a MAC address the script finds the printer (network or USB) and installs the deb and offers to make it the default.

The driver files are 32bit. On a 64bit system you need ia32-libs and you need to edit the install script to "--force-architecture"

My MP640 prints and scans over the network and has been installed under Debian, Ubuntu and Mint.

I have had issues with the latest 64bit Ubuntu with the debs having dependency problems. Your manual approach might have worked, but I installed a minimal 10.10 and installed the drivers, then dist-upgrade.

At least Canon do provide drivers. It would be better if they licensed them so distros could package them.
May 30, 2011 at 5:37 PM
Anonymous said…
HP printers on linux are plug&play it works.
I recently bought an HP printer+scanner, set it up on ubuntu 10.04 which is distribution that was published before this printer even existed by downloading their drivers and scanner and printer instantly worked. the features are great too: ink level display, button for cleaning the heads and so on.

This is my second HP printer, for the first one (4 years ago or more) i had more or less the same experience.

http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/index.html
May 31, 2011 at 1:26 AM
zeenix said…
HP printers on linux are plug&play it works.
I recently bought an HP printer+scanner,

Well, obviously not this one. I've tried in both Ubuntu and Fedora. Maybe with USB, it does but I refuse to connect it with cables when I don't have to. :)
May 31, 2011 at 5:57 AM
Anonymous said…
which HP model does not work? you check compatibility:

http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/supported_devices/index.html

and you can do it before buying.

IMO HP devices are the best choice for linux users.
May 31, 2011 at 10:59 PM
Travis said…
You can get the mac address easily if you know the IP via the arp tables

arp
September 10, 2011 at 4:41 PM
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