Cfrgtkky

Problem:

Each time I set up a fresh (new) Ubuntu, I struggle to get my MP495 to work. With Ubuntu 18.04 the printer finally works right out of the box but the scanner did not.

What I tried so far:

• installing Simple Scan (preferred tool) => no scanner found


• downloading the official Linux IJ Scanner Driver => unmet dependencies


• trying to install the canon scangearmp driver manually, e.g. with this tutorial => impossible

How can I get my scanner installed to simply use it with Simple Scan?

After a couple of hours almost messing up my system and cleaning it up again I found a too simple solution which I share here for others and myself to find it in the future:

• Install Xsane via Ubuntu Software
  


• Start Xsane and restart the printer, connect the scanner


• xsane automatically installed the scanner and was able to scan


• install Simple Scan, start and scan


• remove Xsane
  

If the scanner is not found, try to restart it and reconnect it to another USB port (weird, I know -.-). Maybe the whole Xsane stuff was not even necessary, I'll update this answer when I next reinstall the operating system. Feel free to comment if you were able to reproduce this or not.

The sane library from very old ubuntu (14.04) works with this printer. I have to run a small docker container for ubuntu 14.04 for that reason. Just install minimum ubuntu 14.04 and install xsane which would pull the dependencies.

It is sad that the sane project did not hear bug report and address this driver at all after many bug reports.

UPDATE:

As of now with ubuntu 18.04 I did

add-apt-repository ppa:thierry-f/fork-michael-gruz
apt install cnijfilter2 scangearmp2 cndrvcups-utility
usermod -aG lpadmin

logout and re-login

Use firefox to access http://localhost:631 and search for new printer and add it.

Run xsane and try to scan.

Suprisingly the scan is OK.

However printing got crash from process cnijlgmon3. with SIGSEGV in __libc_start_main() :(

UPDATE AGAIN.

So much for a old printer with bad support form vendor!. I actually make it works using docker and debian wheezy which is the only distro that has libtiff4 and repository still works as of this time.

So spawn a container using this https://hub.docker.com/r/dockette/wheezy/ and run

apt-get install cups sudo libxrandr2

then run the installer from canon support. It will auto detect and add the printer. It does work.
then

make /opt/start-print-server.sh with

#!/bin/bash

mkdir /var/run/dbus

dbus-daemon --system

avahi-daemon -D

exec cupsd -f

commit into an image eg. debian-wheezy:mp495

Run

docker run -d --restart always --entrypoint /opt/start-print-server.sh -v /run/cups:/run/cups --name debian-wheezy -v (pwd):/work --net host  --privileged debian-wheezy:mp495