Michal Čihař - Canon MF8540Cdn on Debian Linux

Canon MF8540Cdn on Debian Linux

I've recently bought this beast and of course want to run it on Linux. Vendor does provide Linux drivers which even come with source, so that looked quite okay in the beginning.

However it turned out not to be that easy. First attempt was to install the 64-bit drivers and all I got from the printer is almost blank page with:

**** Unable to open the initial device, quitting.

Okay, that's not much helpful. Meanwhile I did install i386 system where it worked just fine. I started to smell some problems and looked at the source. It turned out to be almost complete, there was just single i386 binary, which is obviously needed by the driver.

Once realizing this, it was quite easy to make it work on 64 bit system as well:

dpkg --add-architecture i386
apt install libxml2:i386 libstdc++6:i386

Not that I'd be happy to run binary blob on my system, but at least printing now works.

Scanning from the device is easy - all you need to configure access to email and Samba and it works pretty without problems.