Intro

Got this new All-in-One and it is pretty cool. It’s cheap and it has almost everything I need: wifi connectivity, 1200 dpi resolution scanner, high resolution photo printing, direct copy from scanner.

It also has got some bonuses: you can connect a memory card or a USB Drive key to the printer and read/write to it over LAN/WiFI as a samba share. Pretty neat! I didn’t test it yet though, so no promises (WILL UPDATE SOON).

Unfortunately, using this printer under Linux still requires some tweaking and it’s by no means straightforward, hence this post.

Before you start, do yourself a favour and save considerable time: grab a Windows or MacOSX box and set up the printer for wireless operation. There are other ways to do this under Linux, but they are more complicated.

This howto assumes that you are already able to print a test page from your Windows/MacOSX box over your LAN/WLAN.

Printing from Ubuntu Linux

WARNING: I only tested this under Ubuntu Jaunty.

You should already have CUPS installed. If not, install it now.

Also install the development files and everything needed to compile programs on your machine:

apt-get install cups libcups2 libcups2-dev build-essentials

Download the cups-bjnp driver from: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cups-bjnp/

Unpack, configure, compile, install:

cd /tmp

tar xvzf cups-bjnp-0.5.tar.gz
cd cups-bjnp-0.5

./configure && make && sudo make install

Go to Canon Support Australia and download the cnijfilter driver from:

IJ Printer Driver Ver. 2.80 for Linux(debian Common package)

IJ Printer Driver Ver. 2.80 for Linux(debian Package for the MP610 series)

Install them with:

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

Download the PPD and conf files from my website:

canonmp620-630en.ppd
cifmp610.conf

Copy the ppd and conf file to the proper location:

cp canonmp620-630en.ppd /usr/share/ppd/

cp cifmp610.conf /usr/lib/bjlib/

Restart CUPS:

/etc/init.d/cups restart

Turn on the printer and check that you can ping it from your PC.

Open CUPS web interface in your browser: http://127.0.0.1:631

Choose “Add Printer”, give it an alphanumeric name (without spaces) and push “Continue”. On the following page you will be able to choose the “Device”. Pull down the list and select the following entry:

Canon MP620 series ip-address

Click “Continue” and at the next screen select:

Canon MP620-630 series

from the list. Be careful: do NOT search for Canon PIXMA something, search for Canon MP620-630, without the PIXMA bit!

When asked for a login and password, use whatever you configured CUPS to use: by default login is root and password is your root password.

Thumbs up! We are done :-) You can optionally fine tune some settings in CUPS and then print a test page.

Scanning from Ubuntu Linux

Sane will support the Canon PIXMA MP620 scanner starting from version 1.1 . If your distro doesn’t support this scanner out of the box, like in our case, you’ll have to compile the latest CVS snapshot of sane-backends by yourself.

First install some packages required for compilation:

apt-get install libusb-dev autoconf cvs

Download the latest sources via CVS:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.alioth.debian.org:/cvsroot/sane login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.alioth.debian.org:/cvsroot/sane co sane-backends

Compile:

cd sane-backends
autoconf
autoheader
./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var && make
make install

That’s all!

Thanks to…

Michael Krueger (printing): http://www.michael-krueger.org/2009/01/how-to-use-canon-pixma-mp620-with.html

Nicolas (scanning): http://mp610.blogspot.com/