Arch linux and printing helpz

craptakular

craptakular

craptakular

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oh hai. Another day, another distro switch lol...

This time I have got everything working in Arch. Just unsure I should risk nuking it all trying to get my Canon ip4700 working, probably should have tried the printer first lol.

Good old Canon have only made 32-bit drivers for deb and rpm, there are source files, but they look complicated and bound for me to fail and screw the system up.

Heres a link to the drivers:

http://software.canon-europe.com/software/0037280.asp?model=

Can anyone walk me through it? I haven't even installed CUPS in Arch yet.

I have another option though! Setup my parents HP laptop printer on my debian server and share that over the network for basic printing. I could then reboot into windows on my arch box when I want to print photo's out on the Canon IP4700.

What do people suggest?
 
If you can, set up CUPS on your Debian server and set up your printer on there using the PPD file provided (when you extract everything, there's a ppd folder - you want the canonip4700.ppd file). Then just install CUPS on your Arch machine (pacman -S cups), add it to your daemons array in /etc/rc.conf, run /etc/rc.d/cups start and then when you open applications and try to print from them, it should be automatically discovered.

I've just installed CUPS on my Arch laptop, opened gedit and there it is. The printer is shared on my server which has CUPS on it.
 
The Canon ip4700 is actually connected to my arch box in my bedroom so do I just install cups? where do i put this ppd file?

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Cups this is helpful lol

EDIT:

Helpzzzzzz

Printer 'Canon-iP4700-series' requires the 'pstocanonij' program but it is not currently installed. Please install it before using this printer.
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
Oxy said:
The Canon ip4700 is actually connected to my arch box in my bedroom so do I just install cups? where do i put this ppd file?

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Cups this is helpful lol
Click to expand...

I have to admit I've never set up a printer directly connected to a computer in Linux before :P

From a quick glance at the wiki, you need to install CUPS with this bit.

Code: 
pacman -S cups ghostscript gsfonts

Then put that PPD file in to /usr/share/cups/models. I'm assuming it is a USB printer you have connected, so this section of the wiki will be useful http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Cups#USB_printers

Note that it does say Canon users may need to not disable usblp. Then you should be able to start cups with /etc/rc.d/cups start and add it to the daemons section of /etc/rc.conf (I usually put @cups so that it starts in the background). You should, hopefully, then be able to discover the printer when you try to print from your applications.
 
Hmm. I guess it is necessary to compile everything, then. Unfortunately, I've reached the limit of my 'expertise', so I can't really help any more. However it might be an idea to request help on the Arch forum, or on #archlinux on Freenode.

Sorry I can't help more with it.
 
yeh ok no worries dude. I must admit this Turboprint is awesome. It has full functionality the same as windows. I don't think I could ever create this with CUPS. The killer is that it's 30 euro's though.

Do I blow 30 euro's or reboot into windows whenever I wanna print? or I suppose I could sell the printer and see what 100% compatibility linux ones there are.

TBH though turboprints gimp plugin is so amazing, I still don't think cups can match it.

Gonna do some googling *cough* wink wink lol
 
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