I remember, Back In The Day, when getting printers to work with Linux was a pain.
Then, for a glorious while, 'twas easy, and a lot of mainstream printers Just Worked - generally better with Linux/CUPS than with Windows.
Well, the new color laser printer (Canon LBP-622cdw) arrived yesterday, so I figured I'd set it up this morning, while running noisy machinery outdoors seemed inappropriate.
Printer setup under the old version of Debian on the old workstation (connected via USB) doesn't find a driver for it. No surprise there. Well, let's see what the new laptop thinks of it. Connect to the WiFi network... crap. Looks like I need to dig out the smegging user manual to learn how to enter a mixed-case password. Well, try WPS instead. That works. The laptop finds it, thinks there's no driver required, displays toner levels and everything... but when I try to print a test page, all I get is an uninformative, but rude, beep from the printer. No error message I can see.
Fiddle around some more. Meanwhile, the printer times out and dozes off, disappearing from the WiFi network - and, after that, I can't seem to get it to reconnect, nohows. Eh?
Oh, and Canon does offer a Linux driver (I think I checked this before putting the thing on my shopping list earlier this year, but hadn't downloaded it, let along tried to install it). Download, run the installer script. Try to, anyway. It wants yum installed (uh, guys? Debian and derivatives use apt). Install that, and it still doesn't work; it apparently wants to install a bunch of support stuff from repositories that I don't have configured. Seems like it's trying to set up some kind of GUI utility, not just the printer driver.
Back to the workstation. Maybe I should try running an Ethernet cable? But let's try the USB again and see where the trouble is. With the failed driver installation, the printer shows up by its correct handle, but is b0rked. Hmmm. Look at the stuff I'd unpacked from the driver download. Install a .deb for the PPD (cnrcupslbp622czs_5.00-1_all.deb), and one for the rasterizer (cnrdrvcups-ufr2-us_5.10-1_amd64.deb). Restart CUPS. Delete the broken printer instance, and run through the new-printer process. Hooray! It can't report toner levels, but a test page comes out glorious.
It also shows up on the network now, via the workstation's CUPS server, but attempting to print a test page from the laptop gets, again, a rude beep and nothing more. Oh, well. Maybe I need to install the PPD, if not the rasterizer, on the other machines that may want to use the new printer.
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