I’ve finally figured out howto setup my new excellent printer Canon Pixma MP640 on ArchLinux 64 bit. It was quite tricky, but finally I’ve succeeded! Hooray!
Here you can find my solution. In general, it should work in any distro with slight modifications. Imortant thing is that you have to have 32 bit chroot enviroment, or it will not work. I was (and others as well) unable to build source code under 64 bit enviroment.
Fortunatelly, Canon has provided precompilled RPM and DEB packages for 32 bit architecture and source code (nice behaviour, thank you Canon). Under Ubuntu 9.10 32 bit was intallation process piece of cake. With little thinking I’ve managed way to work with arch.
So, here we go…
(a) First and crucial step is checking your CUPS server. It has to be properly installed and configured. Look at the wiki page if you need.
(b) I recommend to stop CUPS before you advance… (I didn’t and *something* had eaten all my free memory… thanks to supernatural powers that we have the kill 
)
# sudo /etc/rc.d/cups stop
(c) Now, nice thing of Arch comes help us … AUR … if you don’t know howto use it, check wiki. Yaourt is the best – wiki.
I have placed packages to AUR: cnijfilter-common in AUR, cnijfilter-mp640 in AUR
(d) You will need some dependencies – for 64 bit system 32 bit libraries, you can obtain them with yaourt as well. Look on dependencies list in the AUR.
# yaourt cnijfilter-common-mp640
# yaourt cnijfilter-mp640
(e) If everything went well, we should have drivers installed. We will start cups server again and configure our belowed printer.
# sudo /etc/rc.d/cups start
(f) Open web browser, type http://localhost:631/ and you should see configuration enviroment of CUPS server.
(g) Go to the Administration tab and then select Add printer button. CUPS should detect yourt printer. I have printer connected over the wifi, so it is listed in the network section. Select your printer and click on Continue.
(h) Change your printer name and description to desired values (or let the defaults as they are) and click Continue.
(i) Finally, select PPD (only one should be there) and use button Add printer.
(j) You will be probably asked for some default options, so select what suits your needs.
(j) You can try print something now. If you are lucky enough, it will work .
Thank you for using my little guide. Next time – setup scanner over network with Canon scangear and hopefully with xsane too .
