If you are a happy owner of Canon PIXMA IP1500 – you probably know that it’s a good and very reliable color printer.

Windows users are happy with fully-functional driver, that’s even included in the latest versions of the OS – so you just plug printer and that’s all, everything works.

But if you are a Linux user – things are not so bright… there is a driver from Canon, but it works only in ancient Linux versions – and no updates are provided.
The good thing that there are source code of the driver – it’s not fully opensource, but the part is, and closed-source libraries are provided.

So I decided to port it to up to date Linux versions in my spare time.
For now I can print, can run servicing functions, but there is a big field to make improvements.

What’s done as for now:

• Rebased Canon’s USB backend on top of latest CUPS backend
• Updated build system to work with new autotools
• Fixed page size handling with some software
• Fixed compilation with newer libraries – libpng, libxml, libcups etc
• Fixed CUPS queue handling with default job privacy settings found in new CUPS versions
• Ported GUI program to GTK2

Todo is:

• Package for Debian
• Improve status monitoring
• Add more options to PPD – such as borderless printing
• … more to come

All modifications are on my github: https://github.com/Magister/bjcups-2.50