Adding Canon Pixma MX860 to Ubuntu 14.04

Question

I have a Canon Pixma MX680 all-in-one hard-wired to my LAN.

Trying to add a printer using Settings | Printer | Add Printer | Network Printer gave me a whole bunch of choices--Find Network Printer, AppSocket/HP Jetdirect, ipp, https, ipp14, and so on. I tried to use "Find Network Printer" using my printer's IP address (no hits), then its MAC address (changing the usual colon separators to the apparently-Ubuntu-standard hyphens), and it seemed to find the printer, and I chose the driver from the list, and it showed up in the Printers box, but I couldn't print a test page.

I removed the printer and tried this approach from the command line. It seemed to work, and again the printer shows up in the Printers box. Still, I'm unable to print a test page. Looking at Properties | Settings, I see that Printer State is "Processing - printer not responding; will retry," then going back to "Processing." Print queue shows my test pages lined up (and I deleted them--or cancelled?--what's the difference?).

As suggested by that page, I installed XSane, which was able to find the printer's scanner and scan successfully.

So, it doesn't seem that it ought to be a big step to get the printer going--eh?

Any help gratefully received. If an answer requires undoing what I did, please let me know how to do that. If it requires typing things into terminal mode, I'd very much appreciate an explanation of what the lines do (I've been working with computers a long time, but I'm completely new to Linux). Many thanks.

Solution

I simply installed the cups-backend-bjnp package in the Ubuntu 14.04 repository to find my MX850 after upgrading from 12.04.

sudo apt-get install cups-backend-bjnp

Comments

[Run CMD]

I added my WLAN enabled AIO via socket://a.b.c.d:9100 and chose the right model. That's it. It wasn't detected automatically I think but I didin't care.

[Cherns]

Thanks for your reply.Canon says no Linux drivers, but I have been able to load some, from Canon Europe or CUPS. Problem is, can't connect to printer: "Unable to locate printer". Various ways to connect--socket, ipps, ippp, etc., but I can't find the right combination. I know the IP address and MAC address, but I don't know how to use these to connect. Maybe Canon is right and I can't use the printer under Linux?

[Organic Marble]

Glad you got it working. Printer installs are one of the hardest things I've dealt with in Ubuntu.