[sf-lug] installing a Canon "i560" photo printer, on : eeebuntu and/or Ubuntu 6.06

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Mikki McGee (mikkimc at earthlink.net):

> Hello, All;
> 
>    Well, maybe I am learning --- maybe.
> 
>    A friend just donated a Canon 'i560' to my collection of antique,
> out of date equipment.

Short answer:

If I had to set up that printer, I'd try CUPS + Gutenprint first, which
is then said to autodetect the printer (on USB only) and print well.  If
that doesn't work, gimp-print and select BJC-7000.

You picked another slightly challenging bit of hardware, but maybe the
above method will be painless.


Background:

This is a bubblejet colour printer, and unfortunately it's a classic
example of manufacturers of cheap colour printers regarding all information 
about how to support them as 'secret sauce' to be hidden lest
competitors be able to study their hardware, so they refuse to cooperate
with the open source community.  This entry at Openprinting.org suggests
that the 'gutenprint' selection of filters ('drivers') automatically
support it:
http://www.openprinting.org/printer/Canon/Canon-i560
See also:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupportComponentsPrintersCanon

Other discussions claim you can just select 'BJC-7000' in the gimp-print 
selection of filters, and that that works well enough.  (The BJC-7000
was/is another, apparently very similar Canon bubblejet.)


Digression about widespread bad advice you will find:

If you search the Web for 

    canon i560 linux

...as I did, _most_ of the advice you will find, especially on
ubuntuforums.org, linuxforums.org, linuxquestions.org, and other
new-user-dominated Web forums, will tell you to download and use a
proprietary filter set contained in two files
(bjfiltercups-2.4-0.i386.rpm and bjfilterpixusXXXi-2.4-0.i386.rpm),
which are slightly broken already and require you to chase down a
package to provide required old libraries libpng.so.2 and libtiff3g .

A lot of people, especially new users, end up having to learn the hard
way that going for proprietary hardware drivers / filters is often an
exercise in short-term masochism, and also tends to lead to long-term
system fragility (because, being proprietary, the code in question
cannot be maintained by the open source community).  Unfortunately,
because those users flock together on said Web forums, they hear a lot
of really bad advice (IMO).