The Canon PIXMA MP250 is a wonderful scanner and printer combination, a printer that is compact, elegant and produces high quality prints. Unfortunately printing and scanning is not natively supported by Ubuntu. Fortunately the drivers for printing and scanning are available in deb format. With a few installations and configurations, full functionality of the printer/scanner can be achieved in Ubuntu

Installing the PIXMA MP250 Printer

1. Head over to the Canon driver page and download the printer driver (MP250 series IJ Printer Driver Ver. 3.20 for Linux (debian Packagearchive)) for the MP250 printer series

2. The download will be a tar.gz file, extract the contents of that file, and install the two packages (cnijfilter-common_3.20-1_i386.deb and cnijfilter-mp250series_3.20-1_i386.deb) contained in the extracted folder by double clicking them and following the on screen prompts.

3. Once installed, connect and turn the printer on, Ubuntu should recognize it and suggest the correct driver.

Installing the PIXMA MP250 Scanner

This part is slightly tricky as it involves installing the Sane backends, which is the system responsibly for scanning on Ubuntu.

1. Head over to the Canon driver page and download the scanner driver (MP250 series ScanGear MP Ver. 1.40 for Linux (debian Packagearchive)) for the MP250 printer series

2. Install the two .deb packages (scangearmp-common_1.40-1_i386.deb and scangearmp-mp250series_1.40-1_i386.deb)  contained with in the tar.gz downloaded package by double clicking them and following the on screen prompts.

3. Open a terminal and roll up your sleeves, this is where it gets slightly messy. In you terminal copy the following command:

sudo apt-get install libusb-dev build-essential

This will install some required packages for the scanner

4. Now we need to get the sane backend, we will do this via git. If you don’t already have git installed on your pc, run the following command in your terminal

sudo apt-get install git-core

5. Now we will need to fetch the sane backend by running the following command:

git clone git://git.debian.org/sane/sane-backends.git

This will download the sane backend into the sane-backend folder within your home folder.

6. Once the download is finished you will notice that it is an uncompiled package, meaning that it will have to be compiled manually. Don’t worry, as it is quite a simple process to compile and install a package. Firstly move into the downloaded folder:

cd sane-backends

7. No we can run the configuration of the package with the following command:

./configure –prefix=/usr –sysconfdir=/etc –localstatedir=/var

8. Once the configuration is complete we are now ready to compile the package by entering the following command into the terminal:

make

This process may take a while

9. Last step now is to install the package that was compiled in the previous step, note this last step requires the sudo (super user) command :

sudo make install

10. The scanner is now installed, however the permissions still need to be set. To set the permissions we will create a new file that will allow usage of the scanner. In the terminal, open Gedit:

sudo gedit

Onne Gedit is opened, copy and paste the following text into the empty gedit file

SUBSYSTEM==”usb”, ENV{DEVTYPE}==”usb_device”, MODE:=”0666″

SUBSYSTEM==”usb_device”,MODE:=”0666″

Save the file in the /etc/udev/rules.d/ directory, titled 40-scanner-permissions.rules

Your PIXMA MP250 scanner is now installed. You may now fire up the Xsane scanning utility and scan away.

Tags: Configuration, Hardware, Installation, Packages, Printing, Scanning, Software

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Tutorials. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.