Blogternals

Today I switched to Fedora (Fedora 11 as of this writing but 12 is only a couple days away so it should still work the same way) and one of the first things I needed to was to install the print drivers for my Canon Pixma IP1800 printer. I love my little Canon printer and I hate the fact that you have to jump through a few hoops to get it to work with any Linux distribution, but believe it is worth it. I have done this in a few distros and believe me it is the easiest to pull this off in Fedora. Well lets get started first you will notice that the drivers for this printer are i386 but yum will take care of this for us.


You are going to need the following two packages that Canon has nicely provided for us:
cnijfilter-common-2.80-1.i386
cnijfilter-ip1800series-2.70-1.i386

Now that you have the two files we will need to install them. Before we do you will need to temporarily to temporary change the variable gpgcheck=1 to gpgcheck=0 in the file /etc/yum.conf. This disables the signature checking. You will need to be root to edit this file but you will also need to be root to install the rpms as well so go ahead and break your terminal and su to root. Navigate to the folder were the two rpms are located. Now you just need to run the following commands and follow the directions.

    yum install cnijfilter-common-2.80-1.i386.rpm
    yum install cnijfilter-ip1800series-2.70-1.i386.rpm

Don’t forget to change the variable gpgcheck=0 back to gpgcheck=1 in the file /etc/yum.conf. Now you can set up your new printer using the “System >> Administration >> Printing” application to install your new printer. When you get to the part for selecting the Driver it will be under something similar to “Canon >> IP1800 ……. 2.70″. After you get your printer setup you should be good to go.

Enjoy and Have a Good’n!