Mageia forum

After a long time without printing, i plugged in my Canon LBP2900 to print a few documents. Linux support for Canon drivers has always been pretty bad, but this time it took me quite a while to get to print anything on Mageia 4, so i'm posting this in order to help other Canon users searching for help.

So, after following the instructions on the driver's manual and other sources like the LBP3100 thread on this forum, Ubuntu's wiki, Arch's wiki, etc... the printer still didn't print. The problem lies with /dev/usb/lp0 not being created, which is weird because Mageia 4 doesn't blacklist usblp like othes.
After a bit of digging dmesg's messages i noticed that lp0 is in fact briefly created, but destroyed right away for lack of proper driver detection. A bit of searching led me to https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=873123 an luckily that solved my problem.

Long story short: after you've added your printer like stated in the driver's manual, you must execute this 2 commands:

lpadmin -p <printer> -R usb-unidir-default
lpadmin -p <printer> -o usb-no-reattach-default=true

Maybe this should be on the wiki somewhere to better help other users?

Well, if it's a bug that can be fixed best report it at our bugzilla. In the meantime feel free to add it to the Errata for Mageia 4 in the wiki, as there doesn't seem to be a dedicated page for Canon printers.

I have found that Canon's software works fine if you download the source code from the Canon website and then compile it on the Mageia system.
The process is rather tedious, but if one perseveres, the compiled binaries do in fact work.(Sometimes a bit of fiddling is required in order to put the relevant files in the right places within CUPS.

Canon has always been somewhat lacking when it comes to Linux driver support.

When in doubt, hack the source.

Do you have a link for the source code and are there any tutorials anywhere on how to do that?

That is absolutely not necessary. But anyways, please have a look at the age of this thread, last reply was from over a year ago.
And please do not cross-post. Continued in your thread: viewtopic.php?f=24&t=10198

Having a problem with a Canon PIXMA mg5520 wireless printer/scanner in Mageia 5. Unit works fine using Linux Mint Debian Edition but after inserting the exact config info in Mageia the "Cannot find printer" msg pops up. Can't spot what is different so need help.

Best regards,

Please at the very least open a separate thread and provide some basic information, like how is the printer connected (USB,wifi, ...)
Also please pay atention to the firewall settings: viewtopic.php?f=24&t=9986

Forget it I'l just go back to LMDE