Getting a Canon LaserBase MF5650 printing on Linux

I traded my Samsung SCX4200 for my parents old Canon LaserBase MF5650 as its not supported under Windows 7/10 and the Samsung is still supported.

I had hoped that my Ubuntu Xenial Linux desktop would have drivers and it would all just work, unfortunately the Canon MF* series of printers are not supported as they use a different communication protocol for printing.

Luckily someone on Internet has reversed the protocol and written drivers for Linux (and possibly other OSes that make use of CUPS printing)

Download the drivers source from https://github.com/ondrej-zary/carps-cups

You’re going to have to build the driver from source so you’ll need all the standard build/compiler stuff installed. You’ll also need some of the CUPS dev packages, in my case those were:

libcups2-dev
libcupsimage2-dev

Then its simply a case of running make and then make install (as root) to build and install the drivers.

After this you can go into the printers settings and add the printer and it’ll be detected and the drivers installed.

Scanning appears to work with the usual SANE stuff, although I have haven’t fully tested that yet.