May 4, 2009

New Sane version 1.0.20 released

Today, great news for all Pixma MFP owners and Linux users !


After more than now 14 months, since the last Sane version released (1.0.19), the Sane team is proud to announce the new 1.0.20 version of the Sane library, available since Monday, 3 May 2009.

This new version includes as usual, many backend updates and fixes, and especially all the latest pixma backend stuff for driving Canon Pixma scanners, formerly available only in the CVS tree.

As soon as Linux distros will have incorporated this new Sane release into new distribution releases or updates, you will not need getting and building anymore by your own, the Sane CVS code, as you probably used to do for several months.

I would like to take the opportunity of this event, to congratulate all people, contributors, testers, developers, authors, bloggers, ... who participated into this important and complex project, leading today to a very successful and satisfying result.

Thanks.

Nicolas Martin

February 7, 2009

Canon printer driver and CUPS error

Maybe you experienced this particular error message while trying to install the cnij_usb Canon printer driver for your PIXMA, on recent CUPS version (or recent Linux distributions):

"Error-Client-Not-Possible"

This error message will be raised by CUPS during the printer installation, as the name formerly used by Canon for its CUPS backend: namely cnij_usb, does not conform to the CUPS standard (RFC 3986), as it contains an underscore character "_" in its name.
Older version of CUPS did not reject this, but this is filtered out now in recent CUPS releases, available on recent Linux distributions.

Canon has released a fix for that, and has renamed the backend: cnijusb simply throwing out the underscore character.

This new backend is only available in the 3.00 release of the Canon drivers, in the package:
cnijfilter-common_3.00-1_i386

This package is one of the 2 packages to install for a PIXMA printer.

You can get this package on canon-asia web site, for e.g. the MP638. Simply install it (no need to unistall a previous package, it will override it), it can be used along for instance with the 2.80 driver (for MP610) or 2.70 (for MP600) Canon printer specific package (cnijfilter-mpXYZ_2.80-1_i386).
Choose the .deb or .rpm package according to your distribution.

This is good news anyway: Canon is following the Linux move, and bring the necessary updates to its Linux software accordingly.

January 10, 2009

New MP620 and MP630 printers PPDs


If you're an MP620 or MP630 owner, you've perhaps struggled a bit to set up the printer part under Linux.

Those 2 models support the Canon MP610 printer driver, but the print parameters require a little "tune up":
They can work only if the "paper switch" option is either set to "Cassette" or "Rear Tray". But never set it to "Paper Feed Switch", or it will just print a blank page ...

Unfortunately, this latest option is the default for MP610, so a MP620 or MP630 newly installed printer requires a manual change to this option in the CUPS printer settings menus.

This is a bit annoying, and ... so easy to fix by tweaking again the PPD file ...
So I uploaded along with the MP600/MP610 PPDs, 2 new PPDs for MP620 and MP630 (in English and French), that simply remove the "Switch" option, and select "Cassette" as default paper source.

Installing this MP620-MP630 PPD will let you use now your printer out of the box without tweaking first the paper select option, and prevents from selecting a wrong paper source when printing.

Hope this helps ;-)