How to use the Canon PIXMA MP620 with Kubuntu 8.10

Well I have to admit that all of the information in this post is collected from several places in the web. Since some of the information already available was written in French language, I decided to write this tutorial in English, so that a greater portion of the web can benefit from this.

The procedure will be documented in three steps:

1. Make the Canon MP620 printer work when directly attached via USB
   
2. Make the Canon MP620 printer work via WLAN/LAN
3. Enable the scanner of the printer

This may be a little odyssey but also a fun project. I hope other users of the great multifunctional printer can benefit from this article...

1. Make the Canon MP620 printer work when directly attached via USB

Currently it is not possible to enter a required security token to access a WLAN router directly on the printer. Because of that you may want to setup the Canon printer via the Windows driver to assign and transfer the correct connection details for your WLAN router. Another solution is to directly connect the printer via LAN cable with your network. In any case use your DHCP server to locate the IP address assigned to the printer and make it a permanent assignment. That way the printer is ready to accept print jobs via network. CUPS does support this very well, but to start with we will directly attach the printer using the USB cable.

So first you need to get the drivers provided by Canon Australia and install them into your system. Those files are called:

1. cnijfilter-common_2.80-1_i386.deb
2. cnijfilter-mp610series_2.80-1_i386.deb

When you have those files you can install them into your system. Make sure to use the same order!

~$ sudo dpkg -i cnijfilter-common_2.80-1_i386.deb
~$ sudo dpkg -i cnijfilter-mp610series_2.80-1_i386.deb
~$

Unfortunatly there are some problems with the driver provided by Canon. But the community provides an enhanced version of the driver which you can download here. Get the PPD file for the MP620 printer (MP620 and MP630 enhanced PPDs).
Now unpack the archive and follow the instructions from the README file to install the files into the right places on your system. The instructions from the README file require you to copy the file Cifmp610.conf into your system. Before you do that, edit that file and append the following line to the list of printers:

MP620 1399

Then proceed and copy the file to the location specified in the README file. This will replace the original file provided by Canon but that is fine.
Now you are ready to restart CUPS:

~$ sudo /etc/init.d/cups restart
~$

Now you are ready to attach the MP620 via USB cable with your computer.

Open the "K-Menu" and select "Programs" - "System" - "Printing"
You should see the MP620 as a locally attached printer. You can print a test page right from here. If that is working verify the correct installation by printing a PDF file. If that is all working, you are ready to move on to the next step.

2. Make the Canon MP620 printer work via WLAN/LAN

First you need to check which version of CUPS is installed on your computer. You can do this by opening the following url in your browser: http://localhost:631/
On Kubuntu 8.10 it is 1.3.9 which is perfectly working with the printer. You need to get the CUPS sources for your version of CUPS from their homepage. Please get the source code of CUPS matching the version installed on your Linux system. If not already installed on your system, install the build environment of Kubuntu:

~$ sudo apt-get install build-essential
~$

Now unpack and build the CUPS source code in your home directory (DO NOT TYPE: make install !!!) so that we can create the required Canon network printer driver plugin in the next step:

~$ tar xzvf cups-1.3.9-source.tar.gz
~$ cd cups-1.3.9
~$ ./configure
~$ make
~$

Be patient since the build may take a few minutes. Now get the unofficial Canon network printer driver for CUPS from the project homepage. At the time of this writing, the file cups-bjnp-0.4.tar.gz was the most current version. Unpack the bjnp archive into the source tree of CUPS since the module depends on the files created in the previous step:

~$ pwd
~$ cups-1.3.9
~$ tar xzvf cups-bjnp-0.4.tar.gz
~$ cd cups-bjnp-0.4
~$

If you use a 64 Bit version of Kubuntu you need to open the Makefile and locate the option: OPTIM
Please add the option -m64 so that the 64 Bit version of this CUPS plugin is build. For 32 Bit systems you do not need to edit the Makefile.
Now you should be able to invoke make in the directory to build the Canon network driver for CUPS, but on my system for some reason the parameter VERSION from the Makefile wasn't passed into the bjnp.c source file. So I simply added the following line above the main method to work around it:

#define VERSION "0.4"

Then I saved the file and make was able to build the driver with no problems.
At this point you should have a binary called bjnp in the current directory.
Next step is to copy this binary into the backend folder of your CUPS installation. For my Kubuntu 8.10 the file does belong into the /usr/lib/cups/backend folder:

~$ sudo cp bjnp /usr/lib/cups/backend/

Now you are ready to restart CUPS:

~$ sudo /etc/init.d/cups restart
~$

At this point you are ready to add the printer using the CUPS web page at http://localhost:631/
Give the printer a name and description which is different from the name used with the USB port so that you can differentiate the two. If you click next, CUPS will search for new printers and should find the Canon at it's IP address. Select the printer and click next. The PPD file for the MP620 should already be selected. Click next to finish the printer setup. You may have to specify your username and password so that CUPS is able to add the printer to your system which is allowed for root only.
The printer should show like this afterwards:



Have fun printing wireless.

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Credits and special thanks go to:

1. Nicolas
2. Louis Lagendijk
   
3. Maxime Garcia