July 28, 201312 yr I'm really stuck and I need some help from you Linux gurus out there. CUPS installed and Canon MF4720w printer added. The printer is connected by LAN and was detected by CUPS when adding the printer. Linux CUPS drivers was downloaded from Canon support site. The drivers were deb and rpm packages but converted to txz in my virtualbox Slackware 14.0 to convert the package so I was able to install it using installpkg. Everything looks ok, except I can't print anything. Printer just gets stuck in the processing state forever. No filter or lib related errors in the error log. I think the printer drivers are ok, because I use the same drivers for my Slackware14 vbox. CUPS test page printed without any problems. I think my unRAID-CUPS installation is good because cups-pdf is working well. I'm aware that unRAID is based on an older slackware distribution, so maybe there are some packages that I need to install. capler's guide http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=16697.msg170374#msg170374 was really helpful for getting CUPS set up. Then based also on other information from all over the interweb, I've installed the following: installpkg cups-1.4.3-i486-3.txz installpkg libtiff-3.9.2-i486-1.txz installpkg libpng-1.4.2-i486-1.txz installpkg libjpeg-v8a-i486-1.txz installpkg fontconfig-2.8.0-i486-1.txz installpkg freetype-2.3.12-i486-1.txz installpkg poppler-0.12.4-i486-1.txz installpkg lcms-1.19-i486-1.txz installpkg ghostscript-8.71-i486-2.txz installpkg ghostscript-fonts-std-8.11-noarch-1.txz installpkg a2ps-4.14-i486-3.txz installpkg gutenprint-5.2.4-i486-2.txz installpkg foomatic-filters-4.0.4-i486-1.txz #official Canon drivers converted to txz installpkg cndrvcups-common-2.70-i386-1.txz installpkg cndrvcups-ufr2-uk-2.70-i386-1.txz # cups-pdf installpkg cups-pdf-2.5.0-i486-1_SBo.tgz Ultimately I would like to get airprint to work. I'm really clueless when it comes to anything Linux, so I really have no idea what I'm doing. I would really appreciate some guidance.
July 28, 201312 yr I'm not going to be able to help with the stated problem, but I'm genuinely curious as to what you are trying to accomplish. The printer is already connected to the LAN, what benefit is there to connecting it to unraid? I was (very possibly mistakenly) under the impression that the only reason to hook a printer up to unraid was to make a USB only printer accessible to multiple machines on the LAN. What other benefits to hooking up a printer to unraid am I missing?
July 28, 201312 yr Ultimately I would like to get airprint to work. This is the key statement. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirPrint I would love to see a plugin for unRAID to enable this functionality. For me, it's not quite worth the effort to go through the manual install just for Airprint, but I wouldn't mind having it.
July 28, 201312 yr I had a go at a CUPS plugin some time back but never finished it. Not at a PC right now or would dig it out. I might be able to advise the original poster as I did get AirPrint on unRAID working and have these days done the same on a Debian VM. Will re-read the first post tomorrow when not on a mobile device.
July 29, 201312 yr Author Thanks for the responses guys. I'm not going to be able to help with the stated problem, but I'm genuinely curious as to what you are trying to accomplish. The printer is already connected to the LAN, what benefit is there to connecting it to unraid? I was (very possibly mistakenly) under the impression that the only reason to hook a printer up to unraid was to make a USB only printer accessible to multiple machines on the LAN. What other benefits to hooking up a printer to unraid am I missing? Its true the printer is already shared across the network, but using unRAID as the print server would provide a bit more functionality. I read somewhere that we can do email-to-print using CUPS (send an email to CUPS and it prints the attachments) - that would be handy, I'm sure. But first I'm more interested to get airprint working. Nowadays I hardly ever have to turn on my computer. SABNZBD, Sickbeard, Couchpotato, transmission and mysql for XBMC all run off unRAID. I do everything else on my iPad. I still need to turn on the computer if I need to print something, but once I'm able to iron out the Canon/CUPS problem... I had a go at a CUPS plugin some time back but never finished it. Not at a PC right now or would dig it out. I might be able to advise the original poster as I did get AirPrint on unRAID working and have these days done the same on a Debian VM. Will re-read the first post tomorrow when not on a mobile device. Maybe my subject title was wrong because my CUPS is working when I print to PDF (cups-pdf printer). Airprint also works with cups-pdf. The real issue is that my Canon printer doesn't print, which is strange to me since it works without a hitch in my Slackware vbox. So, getting the printer to work comes first, and sorting out airprint (which hopefully won't be too hard) will come later.
July 29, 201312 yr One of the reasons I don't consider it a high priority to get Airprint running on unRAID is the availability of cheap, easy, and reliable alternatives. Arch Linux ARM running on a Pogoplug, which only costs $20, is one of those alternative solutions. A Raspberry Pi could do the same. There are write ups out there for both.
July 29, 201312 yr One of the reasons I don't consider it a high priority to get Airprint running on unRAID is the availability of cheap, easy, and reliable alternatives. Arch Linux ARM running on a Pogoplug, which only costs $20, is one of those alternative solutions. A Raspberry Pi could do the same. There are write ups out there for both. For exactly those reasons is why I abandoned doing a CUPS plugin. Was using a RPi as purely a CUPS/Airprint server for quite some time until I went ESXi, and then a VM took over the role. Maybe my subject title was wrong because my CUPS is working when I print to PDF (cups-pdf printer). Airprint also works with cups-pdf. The real issue is that my Canon printer doesn't print, which is strange to me since it works without a hitch in my Slackware vbox. So, getting the printer to work comes first, and sorting out airprint (which hopefully won't be too hard) will come later. No, your subject line wasn't wrong. I realise you're not getting anything from the Canon in UnRAID at this time. I'm not familiar with cups-pdf, so perhaps you can expand on what you had to do to configure that side of things? Would it be correct to assume that cups-pdf uses its own PPD? If so, then wouldn't it be fair to say that a test to cups-pdf isn't really testing the Canon route in so much as although it'll sanity test the bulk of your CUPS installation, the print job is possibly not going through any number of the steps, filters and PPD's that it needs to when printing to your Canon? You mentioned nothing in the logs indicating a problem. I remember similar when first trying to figure out why my Canon MP610 wouldn't print. I recall having to up the CUPS logging level to debug before I found the root cause. Might be worth a go if you've not done so already. For me it gave a much better breakdown of all the steps in a print job and I was able to see where it broke. Think its "LogLevel debug" in cupsd.conf. I'm interested to know more about what you have in the now converted deb and rpm packages? I found that I didn't need to bother creating or converting a package. All I needed - which was the hardest to find - was the canon filter (pstocanonij in my case). I got this from "cnijfilter-common-2.80-1.tar.gz" which contains the source which I built on a Slackware 13.1 system. The PPD was easy to get. Not sure how much this will help, but have attached a zip of my original CUPS plugin. Use it for reference only as I doubt it'll work out of the box. The links in the plugin are no longer valid, but should be fixable by adding "/_Archive/" into the path between "/UnRAID/" and "/CUPS/". Filter also attached to this message. eg. Orig code: <FILE Name="/boot/packages/cups-1.5.4-i486-2.txz" Run="upgradepkg --install-new"> <URL>http://dl.dropbox.com/u/572553/UnRAID/CUPS/packages/cups-1.5.4-i486-2.txz</URL> </FILE> New code: <FILE Name="/boot/packages/cups-1.5.4-i486-2.txz" Run="upgradepkg --install-new"> <URL>-q --no-check-certificate https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/572553/UnRAID/_Archive/CUPS/packages/cups-1.5.4-i486-2.txz</URL> </FILE> Hope the above is some help. Good luck! Regards, overbyrn cups-0.2-rj.plg.zip pstocanonij.zip
July 29, 201312 yr Author I have the assumption that unRAID is as fully capable as any other linux distro - it just needs the correct packages to get it going. If it could accomplish the required job just by having a few additional things installed, I would do that rather than set up another device or VM. It just seems like a waste... Yeah, i think cups-pdf ( http://www.cups-pdf.de/ ) uses its own ppd. You're right - printing to PDF was just to show that my CUPS was installed and working properly. I don't think it uses any of the Canon drivers or filters. I'll attach my converted driver packages later when I get home. I felt it was easier for me to convert and install the whole package. Eventually I figured out which PPD and filter (mine is pstoufr2 or something) my Canon used. Thanks for attaching your plugin. I'll check it out later. I'm sure it will be helpful. I'll also take another look at the logs, but I'd probably need some help deciphering it.
July 30, 201312 yr I have the assumption that unRAID is as fully capable as any other linux distro - it just needs the correct packages to get it going. And therein lies the rub. UnRAID is a fully capable Slackware distribution, but unfortunately, Slackware doesn't have the best package management system. This makes dealing with dependencies much more challenging than a typical Debian derivative (e.g. Ubuntu).
July 30, 201312 yr Author I set loglevel to debug, then I created another test print job for my Canon printer. As with before, the printer status gets stuck at Processing - "Connected to printer..." I don't see anything in the CUPS error log that hints at missing libraries or bad drivers... I attached my CUPS error_log so hopefully an expert can have a look through it and tell me what could be stopping my Canon from printing. Here are the links the driver packages I converted from RPM. The drivers should be okay because I installed it in my slackware vbox and it works fine. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32061164/cndrvcups-common-2.70-i386-1.txz https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32061164/cndrvcups-ufr2-uk-2.70-i386-1.txz Overbyrn's plugin looks really good. Looks like it even creates the Airprint service and everything. Did it not work? Its a shame you abandoned it. cups_error_log.txt
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