canon / mf8350 / driver hell

Building Canon MF8350Cdn (and other) CUPS drivers for Linux Debian and/or Ubuntu on amd64 is still a pain in the behind.

Problems encountered during the installation, include:

• Regular make installed stuff in different places but forgot many parts.
  Solution: use dpkg-buildpackage
• The libtool copied wasn’t able to build for shared libs.
  Solution: remove --enable-shared/--disable-shared command line options.
• amd64 had to be added to the architecture targets.
• A shell script had to lose a bashism.

The right steps

• Download and extract:
  Linux_UFRII_PrinterDriver_V250_us_EN.tar.gz (download)
• Change dir into:
  Linux_UFRII_PrinterDriver_V250_us_EN/Sources
• Extract the two tar balls found there:
  cndrvcups-common-2.50-1.tar.gz
cndrvcups-lb-2.50-1.tar.gz
• Patch both with this patch:
  canon_mf8350-wjd.patch (view)
• Go into both directories and run:
  dpkg-buildpackage
  (* See Update below!)
• There should now be 4 deb packages in the Sources dir:
  cndrvcups-common_2.50-1_amd64.deb (download)
  cndrvcups-lipslx_2.50-1_amd64.deb (download)
  cndrvcups-ufr2-uk_2.50-1_amd64.deb (download)
  cndrvcups-ufr2-us_2.50-1_amd64.deb (download)
• Install all, except one of the UK or US versions.
• Manually run ldconfig

Finally, when installing the printer, you’ll have to decide which driver you want. I chose the “Canon MF8300C Series UFRII LT ver.2.5 (color, 2-sided printing)” driver because it is the closest match to our “MF8350Cdn”.

This took way too much time — like some things do. Useful debug information was obtained using the LogLevel debug option in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf.

Observe that these packages require the ia32-libs (* See Update below!) to be installed.
The reason for that is that not everything in Sources is in source form :-(