So the other day we went out and finally bought a printer

We chose the Canon iP1800. It’s not exactly the printer we wanted but it will do the job.

Well get home and connected it to Cecilia’s old laptop (which is running Debian Etch), and lo and behold it’s automagically picked up, so just needed to configure cups and samba.

Well added the printer with the default drivers (as I couldn’t find any that worked), and shared it via samba. Then installed it on Cecilia’s laptop (xp) and the drivers on the disk worked

One down, three to go. Then finally today I managed to find some drivers and got them installed

Original article was a little help, well it had the drivers. then just needed to issue the following commands: NNB: This will “break” your install
% sudo dpkg -i --ignore-depends=cupsys --ignore-depends=libc6 cnijfilter-common_2.70-2_i386.deb cnijfilter-ip1800series_2.70-2_i386.deb
(Reading database ... 30651 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace cnijfilter-common 2.70-2 (using cnijfilter-common_2.70-2_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement cnijfilter-common ...
Preparing to replace cnijfilter-ip1800series 2.70-2 (using cnijfilter-ip1800series_2.70-2_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement cnijfilter-ip1800series ...
Setting up cnijfilter-common (2.70-2) ...
Setting up cnijfilter-ip1800series (2.70-2) ...
Restarting Common Unix Printing System: cupsd.
%

You will note that I added a couple of –ignore-depends items, this is just for Etch, as Lenny has the required packages.

Then via the cups web interface I changed the driver and pointed it to the ppd file in: /usr/share/cups/model/custom/canonip1800.ppd. then printed a test page and voila

Happy printing!!