Update, December 2012

Moving on to Mint Nandia, based on Ubuntu 12.10, Michael’s drivers in canon-trunk suport two-sided printing! At last!

Update3, May 2012.

Moving forward to Mint Maya (based on Ubuntu 12.04), I found that Michael’s Canon repository did not have a driver version for Precise and that the previous ones used in Oneiric, would not work.

In order to solve this problem, you need to follow these steps:

• Uninstall the existing canon drivers
• Remove the existing canon repository from your sources
• Add the new repository:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:michael-gruz/canon-trunk
sudo apt-get update

• Re-install the drivers corresponding to your printer, with Synaptic. You may have to use the i386 packages if amd64 ones are not available. They will still work!

Update, Feb 6, 2012

While trying out Mint 12 (amd64) with the brilliant Cinnamon flavour of Gnome 3, I tried to repeat the steps mentioned in the original post, in order to get the printer to work. I failed miserably, because I could not get over the problem with the library libpopt0:386. It appears to be required as a dependency for installation, but when trying to do that, all mint packages are forced to uninstall!

I thought I had to install the original Ubuntu Oneiric in order for the printer to work, that it was some kind of a Mint/Cinnamon bug. But that did not work either…Anyone who’s been there will know that this is a show stopper… You may read on several posts, how difficult it is to set up Canon printers in current amd64 distributions with Gnome 3.

And then, the solution came! There’s a fine gentleman who has set up a LaunchPad ppa (a personal repository) with almost all Canon drivers. And they work! As an added bonus, you also get some utils installed that monitor ink level, etc.Thank you Michael!! You just saved Canon on Linux!

All you have to do is fire up a terminal and do the following:

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