IT/Hardware/Printers

Printing is necessary

In our increasingly cloud based world many like to use electronics and not "waste paper"

One chromebook does more long term environmental damage than three stories(building stories) of paper.

Installation

Make sure you have the printer-driver-gutenprint installed

for some reason it is not there in 20.04 by default.
After installation many many more printers are available with drivers.
This is normally pretty simple. But lately(summer of 2021) some bugs have crept in.

Install from cups ( localhost:631 ) is better.

Use the series version and not the specific version.

For example MG3600 Series and not MG 3680

If you have previously setup a printer with the same name it may fail.

You need to go into /etc/cups and get rid of anything referring to that printer.

Best to stop cups when you do that.

Test page

The default test page is in /usr/share/cups/data/

You can make it any pdf you want but:

half page max
no header or footer.
we modify it to print more ink.

Canon

The MSG began by using HP. That was back in Kubuntu 10.04 and hplip made things much easier.

Since then we switched to Canon because they were easier to get in China, seem more robust, and work forever on CISS(Continuous Ink Supply Systems)

MSG36XX

This is the workhorse.

Full wireless functionality via Bonjour

double sided printing and long lasting

This printer has a nasty tendency of thinking it can't print.

You may need to reset the printer counters using the service reset tool.

Reset Tool

MX922

This is a good printer. circa 2013

Borderless setting though available will cause it to fail printing

Do not use the Suggested/Recommend "MX920 Series Driver"

Choose Canon >> MX922

Known bugs

Description of known issues, how to recognise them and stock responses/actions.

evince: First try to remove (or move away) the ~/.config/evince/print-settings especially if you did changes on print queues, printers, drivers, ... Old settings can prevent printing (See bug 1652791). Also note that evince (and other GTK/GNOME-based applications) often generates very awkward, large PDF files which can make PostScript and PDF printers receive very large and complex files which they cannot cope with. This got improved in newer versions, but old applications, especially ones using GTK 2.x still often cause problems.

Drivers

To get a Canon Printer Driver go to the official Canon website, look for the printer model, and click on 'Get Support'. Then click on 'Drivers, Software & Firmware' and select the correct operating system and Driver as type and search. This should show a list of the available drivers. Select the one needed and download it. Then extract the folder, enter it and install the driver by running install.sh script with the following command:

sudo ./install.sh

After that restart the computer and the installation should be complete.

Change Color Model

The default RGB color model is not the best.
You need to manually change the default color model on about line 656 in the ppd file
1. /etc/cups/ppd/printername.ppd
Change the two instances of RGB to CMYK for defaults
Save and restart cups

sudo service cups restart

You can also change the permissions on the ppd files and allow system-settings to write to them.

sudo chmod 777 -R /etc/cups/ppd/

Networking

As long as you select share printers in Printer Settings this works out of the box in all *buntu systems

From Ubuntu shared printer(host) to Windows computer(client).

We have this written up here:

Networking