Okay, I was given two second hand Canon printers, an old BJC-2100 and an almost new PIXMA iP1500, both uses USB interface, and that is good as I have only a parallel port and it’s already occupied by an old Epson Stylus XL+. One of the two is broken, but I wasn’t told which one, yet. The BJC has still inside the cartridge so I tried that before, configured in CUPS and it was in the gutenprint drivers with no problems, but it doesn’t print, maybe that’s the broken one. Now I’ve connected the Pixma, but… i have no idea how to configure it as it’s not in gutenprint.
Googling, I found that there are drivers for Linux from Canon, but they are released as binaries for i386, using RPMs.
There are sources, yes, but they are not complete, it requires them to be linked against the binary-only i386 libraries.
What does that mean? That I might not be able to use the iP1500 from Linux, mainly. Well I could, as I’m on a multilib setup, I just need to rebuild the sources for x86 and then link them against the binary libraries (I can’t use the binaries because they are built for SuSE 9.1, linking to libraries we don’t carry anymore), but I’m not sure if I will. I can still use the printer from MacOS anyway, as it’s supported by Canon for that OS.
It’s interesting to see how the GPL seems not to be able to protect us against these kind of binary drivers:
LICENSE
* These programs are licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public
License. (See the file COPYING.)
EXCEPTION
* As a special exception, these programs are permissible to link with the
libraries released as the binary modules.
* If you write modifications of your own for these programs, it is your
choice whether to permit this exception to apply to your modifications.
If you do not wish that, delete this exception.
That sucks 🙁