Canon Prixa MP600It’s been about a week since making the switch from WindowsXP to Ubuntu, and I’m quite happy with the experience so far.  My old HP zt3000 notebook runs pretty quick (the boot time is about the same as XP Pro, though) and I haven’t seen one single application failure message yet.  Happy times, indeed.

But one area where I’ve always had trouble with Linux is in the hardware arena.  Most quality system hardware is supported, but it’s the peripherals that we often struggle with.  Printers, scanners, game controllers, PDAs … you name it, and there’s a lack of drivers for it.  Ubuntu, however, is a little different.

Earlier today, I needed to connect my wife’s Canon Prixa MP600 All-in-One printer to scan some images and print them after a little editing.  In Windows, I’d only need to connect the device to an available USB port, install a simple drivers package from the Canon site, and that’d be that.  In Ubuntu, however, it’s not always that easy.

After connecting the device, I was given a happy little message box saying that the specific driver required was not found, and a generic text driver would be used instead.  Kudos to the Ubuntu team for giving us a plain-text driver, as this is often all we need in a pinch, but how could I go about using colour, fonts or the scanner?

I went to the Canon Australia site and found some Linux drivers, but they were rpm’s for a different flavour of *nix … I needed deb files.  To use these, I would need to install another program called Alien, then convert the rpm’s to deb’s and install.  Hardly the simple installation I was hoping for, but since I didn’t know of any other option, it was time to try it.

Installing Alien was pretty easy.  In a terminal window, type: sudo apt-get install alien.  You can also choose to install from the Synaptic application, but I prefer terminals.  You’ll also need the rpm files from the Canon driver site.  Once these are downloaded and Alien is installed, go to the directory with the driver rpm’s and type: sudo alien [name of the file]  (eg; sudo alien cnijfilter-mp600-2.70-2.i386.rpm).  You will need to do this for each rpm file.  After all the rpm’s have been converted, you’ll need to finish the job by typing: sudo dpkg -i cnijfilter-*.  You’ll then have installed all the necessary drivers to print.

If you’d also like to scan, there are scanner rpm’s on the site as well, and you’ll need to use the very same process there.

All in all, this took about 20 minutes from start to finish for both the printer and scanner.  It wasn’t bad, but once everything was said and done, I was missing the ease and simplicity of Windows.  I use to say that Ubuntu was the operating system that I would have no problem letting my parents use, but it’s time to revise that statement: Ubuntu is the operating system that I would have no problem letting my parents use after I set everything up for them.

What if you don’t want to do all that, you say?  Well … after doing all that work with Alien and converting rpm’s to deb’s, I found out that we can use the MP500 driver (bundled with Ubuntu 7.04 and up) just fine.  15 seconds of clicking, and it would have been running.

Whoops.