Want pain? Set up a printer in Linux

I just spent a frustrating couple of hours getting my Canon i950 printer to work in Ubuntu. Setting up Ubuntu was pretty easy but setting up the CUPS printing was a pain. In the end, I got most of the info I needed from this Ubuntu forum thread though it wasn’t smooth and uneventful.

I needed to download and install a bunch of RPM’s from Canon’s Japan site and then that stuff needed libtiff.so.3 which seems to be in a former Ubuntu package called libtiff3g which doesn’t seem to exist in Breezy Badger. So I had to fetch it manually from here, restart the CUPS daemon and then I could setup the printer in the GNOME UI. Alas, I wanted to give the printer a nice simple name like “Canon i950″ but the UI seemed to insist on picking the name “PIXUS-950i-ver.2.2″ based on the driver and wouldn’t let me rename the printer.

So eventually I got printing working in Ubuntu and now it was time to see if I could share the printer with a Windows machine. Luckily, that part was much easier and you can do it without messing around with Samba, by using IPP (Internet Printing Protocol). After following some steps in the Ubuntu FAQ, I was able to use the URL http://192.168.1.30:631/printers/ in my browser to browse the printer setup with ESP. And I followed some steps on the Ubuntu Wiki in order to add the printer – basically adding a network printer and using the URL

http://192.168.1.30:631/printers/PIXUS-950i-ver.2.2