I am experiencing an issue which seems to have been raised back in 2012 (hxxx://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=146730) and again (hxxx://forum.manjaro.org/t/i-cannot-print-after-update-even-after-enable-cups-service-manually/55755/8), and supposedly ‘fixed’ (back in 2012)but here we are, 2022 .
As a new user to Manjaro (KDE) I’m surprised how buggy this OS is, especially with bugs raised back in 2018 and not actually fixed, the biggest being sleep bug and being locked out with incorrect password. And all it took to fix is to change permission on a file. But I digress.
Situation:
Printing test page, after fresh install of Manjaro KDE 5.23.4 (Kernal 5.15.7-1 (64bit).
Using Canon MP640 series - CUPS+Gutenprint v5.3.4
Print job stops half way through, and then is ejected out of the printer after about 10mins, and only half the page is printed.
It isn’t clear to me if you are using the drivers from the AUR. It looks like this model is very old and the Canon webpage only has 32 bit drivers available. In the following link, the user has it working, but not without problems as well. It does not indicate if his issue was ever resolved.
The Canon MP640 is working just fine for me now, with every application with which I use it, except Scribus, which as I mentioned at the time, just persistently queues printer output, then claims to have completed it, without ever even bothering to send anything to the printer.
The similar issue, which I had observed with Firefox, turned out to be transient; it corrected itself with the next (insanely frequent) Firefox major version update.
I did notice a similar issue, with Scribus, on an old LinuxMint system. In that case, it turned out that Scribus was insisting on using the (broken, and thus utterly useless) GutenPrint Pixma driver for the MP640, and I was able to fix it by overwriting that broken GutenPrint driver with a copy of the working official Canon driver. I guess a similar trick might work for Manjaro, but I assume it would just break again, on the next rolling upgrade of GutenPrint, so I haven’t pursued it.
In my experience, the GutenPrint driver for the Canon Pixma MP640 is utterly broken; I have never had any success with a configuration which uses it. I have, however, had reasonable success with the AUR driver for this printer, (which seems to be a derivative of the official Canon driver); there is one exception, of which I am aware — direct printing from Scribus, seems to bypass the CUPS configuration, apparently attempting to use the GutenPrint driver instead, and just does not work.
