Canon Pixma MP140 / MP145 on Ubuntu 10.04

Since I rarely print at home, My Canon Pixma MP145 has been sitting in a corner of my room collecting dust. The Pixma MP145 is a multifunction inkjet printer, with a flatbed scanner unit attached on top.

So anyway, I have been successful in installing the printer on previous version of ubuntu, and it worked flawlessly I might add. Just today, when such need arise, I plugged the usb cord to my 36FG. The printer is automatically detected by Lucid Lynx, but… not driver is available for the unit.

So I headed to Canon Asia’s Linux support page for the MP140.,  and they were cool enough to provide a .deb files for my printer 🙂 I downloaded several files:

• IJ Printer driver Common package
• IJ Printer driver MP140 package
• ScanGear common package
• ScanGear MP140 package

Normally, once all the files above finished downloading, all you have to do is just double click each files, enter your password, and the driver will install itself automatically. But unfortunately, that’s not the case. I encountered an error when trying to install the IJ Printer driver common package:

Selecting previously deselected package cnijfilter-common.
 (Reading database ... 234024 files and directories currently installed.)
 Unpacking cnijfilter-common (from cnijfilter-common_2.80-1_i386.deb) ...
 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of cnijfilter-common:
 cnijfilter-common depends on libcupsys2 (>= 1.2.1); however:
 Package libcupsys2 is not installed.
 dpkg: error processing cnijfilter-common (--install):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
 Errors were encountered

Bummer. But this is strange, since in most cases, GDebi will automatically install any dependencies required to install a package. SO I tried to install libcupsys2 manually, with the following result:

surfer@m5-m3:~/Downloads$ sudo apt-get install libcupsys2
 Reading package lists... Done
 Building dependency tree
 Reading state information... Done
 Note, selecting libcups2 instead of libcupsys2
 libcups2 is already the newest version.
 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 5 not upgraded.

So it seems that the libcupsys2 package has been superseded by libcups2, and the repository no longer provide a dummy translation package for libcupsys2. How do we fix this? Easy. Just download the dummy package from here. Double click the freshly downloaded libcupsys2 package to install it to your system. Next step is to install the four packages that I have downloaded previously. Just double-click each package, make sure that you install the common package first, then the MP140 one.

installing the .deb packages

Update@2011-04-13
If you’re on AMD64/X86_64 platform, install the drivers by opening a terminal window, and do the following:

sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture cnijfilter-common_2.80-1_i386.deb 
sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture scangearmp-common_1.10-1_i386.deb 
sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture cnijfilter-mp140series_2.80-1_i386.deb 
sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture scangearmp-mp140series_1.10-1_i386.deb

Plug the printer to one of the available USB port, turn it on. To setup the driver, head to System > Administration > Printing. Press the Add button. The MP145 will be listed as Canon MP140. Just select the MP140, and press forward. Usually, your system will automatically detect the correct driver for the MP145. If that’s not the case, a “Choose Driver” screen will be shown instead. Just pick Canon from the list, and press forward. On the Choose Driver screen, pick MP140 for the model, and the “Canon MP140 series Ver.2.80[en] for drivers. Press forward. The installation should be finished, and an option to print a test page will be presented.

driver selection

For the scanner part, all that I need to do is to install the following:

• libsane
• sane-utils
• simple-scan

Those packages can be found in Synaptic. After all of the package above are installed, just fire up simple-scan, and it will automatically detect the scanner.