Cannot print to Canon 1210 on LPT1.

[John McCabe-Dansted]

When I try to print a test page to my Canon Laser Shot LBP-1210 on LPT1 (/dev/lp0), gnome-cups-manager reports that the job was processed, however nothing prints.

This could be a driver issue since there is no driver for the 1210, so I had to try the 1000 and 1260 drivers. However this does not seem to explain the errors below.

When I try to print, I get an error:

E [29/Aug/2006:23:06:10 +0800] [Job 15] No %%BoundingBox: comment in header!

in /var/log/cups/error_log
even when not printing, I get ~100 per minute of the following errors:
E [29/Aug/2006:23:11:45 +0800] cupsdAuthorize: Local authentication certificate not found!

My cupsys is 1.2.2-0ubuntu0.6.06. My cpu is a Duron 750Mhz.

BTW, what do the error messages mean?

[Pascal De Vuyst (pascal-devuyst)]

Please use the correct driver for your printer.
According to www.linuxprinting.org this is one of the so-called GDI- or winprinters, a printer with a proprietary data protocol, which is not publicly documented by the manufacturer.

According to information on the Canon website this printer is similar to the Canon LBP 1120. According to www.linuxprinting.org (http://www.linuxprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=Canon-LBP-1120) the LBP 1120 is know to work with the open source "capt" driver, normally your printer should also work with this driver, the driver was reversed engineered by Nicolas Boichat and can be found here: http://www.boichat.ch/nicolas/capt/
A debian package is provided, so it should be easy to install this.
If this driver works well for your printer please fill out the add new printer form on www.linuxprinting.org: http://www.linuxprinting.org/edit_printer.cgi?newentry=1, by doing this the LBP 1210 will be listed on www.linuxprinting.org and people can easily find which driver(s) are know to work with their LBP 1210.

Canon also provides a closed source CAPT Linux CUPS driver for your printer that can be downloaded from their website.
This driver should work without problems but you need to install it manually.

[Ernst Persson (ernstp)]

Are you sure they are closed source? You can download src.rpm's from Canons webpage anyway, but I'm not sure what they contain.

Anyway, either Canon's capt or the homebrew capt-driver should be added to Ubuntu!

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Note that a source RPM is not necessarily 100% source code, it is simply a package which contains everything to build the binary RPMs. For free software it contains source code, but for commercial closed-source software it contains also binaries.

As this driver is partially closed-source we cannot distribute it in the main part of Ubuntu, and for multiverse we would need permission of Canon.

The open-source CAPT driver referenced on FSG OpenPrinting (aka linuxprinting.org) we can add and I am considering to do so.

[Petar Vasić (p-vasic)]

Is there a way of repackaging Canon's RPMs and placing them in commercial/restricted repo?

I've written a tutorial about getting LBP-1120 to work with ubuntu [1], and a lot of people are visiting it every day. (the essence is to convert RPMs to DEBs with alien and replace service scripts)

Free drivers don't work for everyone, are no longer maintained and have known bugs in them (e.g. printing of large images will fail).

Is there a way of letting users choose which driver to use and installing it automatically?

[1] http://v0xel.wordpress.com/2006/05/23/canoon-lbp-1120-on-ubuntu-510-how-to/

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

This shows again that we need distribution-independent driver packages to make it easier for printer manufacturers to supply drivers for all distros. See

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/printerdriverautodownload

[trollord (trollenlord)]

Do you think Canonical's commercial repository or some other solution might come to help with these? Ie. building "restricted drivers manager" for these problematic printer drivers.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

This is not a bug in cups itself, but a missing driver.

For the record, Intrepid's Jockey supports printer driver download from openprinting.org now, so maybe you are lucky and openprinting has a driver for you? Also, it might be worth trying out newer Ubuntu releases.

[Kedar (kedardave)]

Hey buddy

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-672928.html

go to this forum it really works man.............. if it dont then reply me i will surely help ya

Kedar