How to use Canon Pixma TS6050 wireless printer in Fossapup?

[ChrisH]

Hello again.

I've been continuing with my project to set up a Fossapup based system, as described here https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=8985. So far I've had reasonable success, mainly thanks to a lot of help from many of you.

Unfortuntely I'm now stalled with trying to find, install and set up a wireless printer. Actually, to be precise, I'm stalled even in trying to get CUPS to see it. It simply doesn't appear on the list. The only printer available is the CUPS PDF printer. The printer I'm trying to attach is a wireless, Canon Pixma TS6050. The printer operates perfectly well under Windows 10 and from exactly the same hardware, vis an Acer XC-605.

I've searched the forum but can't seem to find a solution to this particular issue. The posts that I've found all refer to problems that are downstream of actually prompting CUPS to find the printer. Just to be clear, the printer is on and visible to the network and Puppy is connected to the network. I've run up CUPS at http://localhost:631/, navigated to the "List Available Printers" screen and this is what I see -

CUPS_screenshot_1.png (42.5 KiB) Viewed 338 times

.

In case it's helpful, these are my system details

Frugal installation of Fossapup64 9.5
Installed on an externally mounted 128Gb SSD (ADATA Model XM11) and connecting to my PC or laptop by cable through a USB port.
System hardware is usually an aging, Acer XC-605 desktop running an Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4440 CPU @ 3.10GHz with 6Gb of RAM. The set up runs entirely independently of the Acer's hard disk.

SSD is partitioned as follows:
1 x FAT32 @ 512Mib for the boot files,
1 x ext4 @ 19Gb for the Puppies, save folders and portables, etc.,
1 x ext4 using the remaining space (approx 100Gb) for my data,
1 x NTFS @ 1.5Gb
No Swap

I'd be grateful for any advice that anyone might be able to offer. (To save time, I realise from checking the forum that starting with "I'm trying to connect a Canon printer ..." is going to result in sharp intakes of breath and lots of teeth sucking but unfortunately I'm stuck with it for now.)

Regards to all,

ChrisH

[dogcat]

Probably need the printer drivers.
These are for the Canon Pixma TS6000 Series
The IJ Printer Driver and ScanGear MP debian Packagearchive 5.40 software is my guess, the page does not distinguish between 32-bit and 64-bit so the driver packages probably cover both.

The drivers are tar.gz zipped archives so you will need to extract them back to the original .deb files (use ROX right-click tools) before you can use them.

I would try installing the .deb packages, reboot, make sure your printer and computer are connected to your network, then check if you can see the printer in CUPS.

https://canon-print.com/canon-pixma-ts6 ... mac-linux/

[Flash]

Drivers must be compiled for the Linux kernel they will be used by.

[ChrisH]

@dogcat Thanks for your advice, I'll give that a whirl. I notice that the link you provided is pointed at what looks like a blog, so not the official Canon downloads repository. I presume the material is safe but in any case I've fortunately managed to locate the official Canon page for the same material. Here's a link in case it's useful to you https://www.canon.co.uk/support/consume ... 20(64-bit) .

@Flash Thanks for chipping in. Although I think I understand your comment on the face of it, I'm not quite sure what the implications are. Do you mean that I'll need to try and find out which kernel the drivers were compiled for? If it was a different kernel would that mean that they're not useable by a Fossapup64 9.5 system?

[ChrisH]

@Flash So, it looks like that particular driver was compiled for Ubuntu 16.04 (32bit/64bit), which is built on Linux kernel 4.4, whereas Fossapup64 is built on Kernel 5.4.53. So Fossapup64 is at least built on a later version of the kernel. Do you think that will be backwards compatible with 4.4 in respect of the driver? Regards, ChrisH

[mikewalsh]

@ChrisH :-

Whilst I agree in principle with m'colleague's statement - certainly, GPU and wireless network dongles are very fussy in this respect - I've been using the same set of Epson printer drivers for almost a decade, across a wide range of kernels.....all the way from a late 2-series in Lucid up to Fossa's k5.4.53. They've worked everywhere.

Mind you, this could be because the Epson ones were built to make use of the LSB framework, which was designed to make cross-machine/cross-OS installation of any drivers more simple. The LSB framework has since been deprecated.....yet the things still work!

I honestly don't know how to answer this one......and I can't help with Canon stuff. Don't know anything about it.

Mike.

[Flash]

@ChrisH, try what you found and see if it works.

[ChrisH]

@mikewalsh thanks and no worries.

@ChrisH, try what you found and see if it works.

@Flash "... I mean, what harm can it do?" And that's the problem with being an aging newbie, I have no idea But that's what I plan to do. I'll let you know how I get on, assuming that I don't crash my system. Regards, ChrisH

[mikewalsh]

@ChrisH :-

"... I mean, what harm can it do?" And that's the problem with being an aging newbie, I have no idea

See, that's one of the best things about Puppy. Because she is SO easy to both back-up AND restore again, it gives you a much greater sense of freedom when it comes to experimenting. It won't matter if you break your Puppy so that it's completely & utterly FUBAR.....because you've got that working version to fall back to in the event of catastrophe!

But it IS important to make sure you create those regular backups. And it's far simpler to do if you're running "frugal", because you just copy the entire directory/partition contents to a safe location. That's all there is to it.

Mike.

[ChrisH]

@ChrisH :-

"... I mean, what harm can it do?" And that's the problem with being an aging newbie, I have no idea

See, that's one of the best things about Puppy. Because she is SO easy to both back-up AND restore again, it gives you a much greater sense of freedom when it comes to experimenting. It won't matter if you break your Puppy so that it's completely & utterly FUBAR.....because you've got that working version to fall back to in the event of catastrophe!

But it IS important to make sure you create those regular backups. And it's far simpler to do if you're running "frugal", because you just copy the entire directory/partition contents to a safe location. That's all there is to it.

Mike.

Thanks for the gentle reminder Mike. I usually remember about 30 seconds after the FUBAR event.