[Nix-dev] canon printer drivers (cnijfilter)

[Matt McHenry]

Hi Nawal,

I see you've been trying to get canon's linux drivers working on nixos
[1][2][3].  I've also tried my hand at this.  I think I've made more
progress than you, but was never able to get it working, and eventually
resigned myself to just printing with the gutenprint driver.  I'd be
interested in continuing to hack at it as time permits, though.

I got to the point of cups executing what I think is the correct chain of
filters, all built from the source that my nix expression pulls from the
Canon Japan website.  However, at least one of the filters is unable to
load at least one dynamically linked library, so it fails.  I don't know
much about shared libraries on linux in general or NixOS in particular, so
I was mostly just thrashing around a lot.

I've pushed what I have to the cnijfilter branch in my nixpkgs clone [4].
To try it, just add pkgs.cnijfilter to services.printing.drivers in
configuration.nix.  (I also tried adding cnijfilter to
environment.systemPackages, that didn't seem to help.)

I've gleaned a lot from the other distros builds [5][6][7].  In particular,
the cnijfilter-common library does not follow a normal versioning pattern
-- each version supports a certain set of printers.  So you don't want the
latest, you want whatever matches up with your printer.  (My printer is an
MX-700, which uses the mp520 driver.  So I've been working on version 2.80
of cnijfilter-common.)  But my hope is that the overall structure of the
build would be very portable between versions.

It looks like you've worked from the debian packages -- perhaps looking in
more detail at how they are built will give us some more clues?

I'm not sure whether it makes more sense to open an issue to document this
work, or keep discussing on the mailing list.

[1] https://mailman.science.uu.nl/pipermail/nix-dev/2017-June/023942.html
[2] https://mailman.science.uu.nl/pipermail/nix-dev/2017-June/023943.html
[3] https://mailman.science.uu.nl/pipermail/nix-dev/2017-June/023946.html

[4] https://github.com/jerith666/nixpkgs/tree/cnijfilter

[5] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=130645
[6] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/cnijfilter-mp620/?comments=all
[7] https://github.com/spremi/cnijfilter-source-3.80
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailman.science.uu.nl/pipermail/nix-dev/attachments/20170620/f0899bed/attachment-0001.html>