Diagnosing the problem when Canon printer fails to print under Ubuntu

Posted by MMA on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by MMA
Published on 2013-07-01T01:02:51Z Indexed on 2013/07/01 4:28 UTC
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I understand that the issue of Canon printer under Linux has a number of posts. Actually one of these, was started by me. After inputs from others I have successfully printed using Canon LBP6000 from my Ubuntu machine for around a year. If it failed to print, restarting the daemon using this homemade script coaxed the printer to print.

#!/bin/bash

pkill -9 -x ccpd
pkill -9 -x captmoncnabc
/etc/init.d/ccpd start
/etc/init.d/ccpd status

Recently, I am not successful any more, or successful on a limited and sporadic basis. Sometimes it prints when turned on after logging in, sometimes when the driver is reinstalled. I keep on trying the random steps (call abracadabras) until I get success. Again, not always success comes. I frustrate on for hours only to get single page printed. I loose precious time on the issue of printing.

I have read and read all the documents available over the Internet. However, if you please notice, none of the guides, articles, tutorials (these are too many to list here) seem to be dealing with diagnosing the problem when it fails to print. They tell you where to find the drivers, how to install them, or which script to run to make the installation process automatic. Yes, some of the articles or comments suggest a step to try, without any systematic order. But these fail to suggest a step based on symptoms, mostly.

This morning, my Canon LBP6000 failed to print. After sometime, there was a message for system error, details of which was found to be something like this.

enter image description here

When I search for this error (c3pldrv crashed with SIGSEGV in write ()), I find a number of articles including this one. None of these are actually helpful. Mostly, these are 'me too', 'tell me if you find anything'.

Running captstatusui -P LBP6000 produced this,

enter image description here

Yes, the printer is connected and actually turned on.

I believe that there a number of frustrated Canon printer users out there like me. But there is not a step by step definitive guide to systematically diagnose a non-printing printer.

Do you think that you can provide your diagnosing inputs so that a systematic document can be built?

May be we will want the Ubuntu users to stay away from Canon printers. But as I believe, as a Linux user for more than fifteen years, such a scenario is not acceptable any more. May be this was acceptable in the infancy days of Linux, but not today.

I am using Ubuntu 12.04, by the way, I prefer LTS versions.

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