Canon multifunction printer: getting the printer drivers and scanner to work in debian/ubuntu/mint

I just installed a Canon multifunction printer(MP210) in Linux Mint (based on debian squeeze/sid, i.e 'debian testing' at this time) Here's how I got the printing and scanning to work.

There were some issues:

First of all the PRINTER drivers (which are in fact a couple of .deb packages inside another archive)  were complaining about a missing libcupsys2

The fix was unpacking the .deb packages(I used the graphical Archive manager from Gnome/Nautilus) , editing DEBIAN/control in the unpacked driver and changing libcupsys2 to libcups2.

After editing both DEBIAN/control files, the drivers had to be repackaged as .deb using

deb -b <unpacked_folder_name>

After these operations, you can install the deb files with 

deb -i <package_name.deb>

, first the package containing -common, then the one containing your device's name.

If dpkg complains about the original packages(which you may have tried to install) being unconfigured, remove them first with

apt-get -f remove <old_package_name>

Okay. The Linux printer test page was fine, aside from the black rectangle being printed at(or maybe passing a little over) the right edge of the paper.

Next step was getting the MP210 multifunction printer/scanner to scan something.

SimpleScan(which is included in Linux mint) said it cannot acces the device. 

I installed XSane and tried again. This time the error was a bit more explicit, stating that the app doesn't have the required permissions to access the scanner.

Google took me(after many minutes) to this post about xsane-pixma, which was the rigtht fix for my little trouble :

The solution is adding an udev rule in

/etc/udev/rules.d, i.e creating the file

/etc/udev/rules.d/40-scanner-permissions.rules

and pasting this text inside it:

# usb scanner
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", MODE:="0666"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb_device",MODE:="0666"

This is sets read-write permissions on USB devices, maintaing behavior after reboots(persisting the rules, you may say)

Next I changed  file permissions so udev can read it

chmod 0644 /etc/udev/rules.d/40-scanner-permissions.rules

,and finally reloaded udev to reflect my changes:

/etc/init.d/udev reload

Voila, XSane worked, everything is ok.

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