I recently bought a Canon PIXMA MG6350 printer for my home office. Before buying it I found Canon had a set of drivers available for Linux so assumed it was reasonably well supported. However the binary packages available from the Canon support site had out of date dependencies for Fedora 20 so weren’t installable, but there was a source package available so I grabbed that.

On the positive side Canon have provided a mostly GPL CUPS printer driver package for Linux, which is to be commended, but unfortunately it doesn’t build out of the box on modern systems and contains a handful of proprietary binary libraries. I spent a bit of time hacking it to build and fix some compile warnings and pushed the result to github:

https://github.com/willnewton/cnijfilter

The following commands will build an RPM for the MG6350, you need to modify it slightly for other printers in the family:


# git archive --prefix=cnijfilter-source-3.80-2/ -o ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES/cnijfilter-source-3.80-2.tar.gz HEAD
# rpmbuild -ba cnijfilter-common.spec --define="MODEL mg6300" --define="MODEL_NUM 408" --with build_common_package


As I mentioned above unfortunately there are some binary libraries in the package which seem to be essential, and the code quality in general seems pretty poor. There are a number of compiler warnings still that show up moderately serious issues with the bits of code in question. There’s a lot of copy and paste reuse and the code is full of fixed size buffers and dangerous assumptions. It lets me print documents from my laptop so I am not entirely unhappy, although it would be nice if Canon would engage with the community on getting these drivers fully open sourced and integrated properly into CUPS.