Candid’s brain

Two options come up when searching for a Canon LBP2900 driver for Linux:

• Download the proprietary Canon driver. Installation is complicated, it involves installing two RPM/DEB packages, cndrvcups-common and cndrvcups-capt, adding the printer with the included tool ccpadmin and then adding a CUPS printer using the ccp protocol (see Tutorial).
• Use the open-source foo2capt driver

Both pieces of software are quite dated, which made the installation already difficult. I didn’t manage to use the printer with them.

A new open-source driver, captdriver is being developped (mentioned here), that actually worked for me. Follow these steps in a root shell:

apt-get install build-essential git autoconf libtool libcups2-dev libcupsimage2-dev # This is on Ubuntu, might be different on your system
git clone https://github.com/agalakhov/captdriver.git # Check out source code
cd captdriver
autoreconf -i
./configure
make
cp src/rastertocapt /usr/lib/cups/filter/ # On some systems this might be /usr/libexec/cups/filter?
cp Canon-LBP-2900.ppd /usr/share/ppd/custom/

Now go ahead and add your USB printer, selecting the driver Canon LBP-2900 CAPT GDI printer, 0.1.0 from the list.

Note: Sometimes, printing gets stuck with the message “Rendering completed”. In that case, it helped to just turn the printer off and on again.