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.

Filed under bugs

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 16th, 2014 at 15:23:15 and is filed under bugs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.