After a few years of wanting one of these printers they are actually very cheap. We picked ours up from Walmart for $49! After looking around online for a all-in-one printer that would work with both of our laptops over wifi we found that this one was pretty well supported. It was actually easier to setup on my Linux system than it was on our Mac running OSX!
In case I have to do this again (or if anyone else out there might find use of this) I am posting it here. These are the steps for setting the Canon Pixma MP495 on a Debian or Debian based system. I am running Debian Squeeze (kernel 2.6.32-5-686) at the moment and did not have to tweek anything.
UPDATE: After installing this on Ubuntu 11.10 (kernel 3.0.0-12-generic) I installed the drivers below on my 64 bit system and it works great.
- Download these files: cnijfilter-mp495series-3.40-1-deb.tar.gz and scangearmp-mp495series-1.60-1-deb.tar.gz
- Place these files in their own directory. Extract them (
tar -xvf *.gz) - Install your respective .deb packages found within the extracted folders, inside the packages directory (
dpkg -i *i386.deb). In all there are four packages that need to be installed. - Change the SSID of your wifi router to BJNPSETUP.
- Activate wifi on the printer by hitting the “maintenance button” 13 or 14 times… until you see a character that looks like a capital “G” without the horizontal line. Then press the color start button.
- Find out the IP of your printer by viewing the list of clients that are connected to your router. The IP address of the printer seemed to be automatically assigned by the router.
- Open your web browser and type in the IP address of the printer.
- Change the SSID to whatever SSID you want the printer to connect to. Hit “Okay” at the top.
- Change your SSID back to whatever you set the printer to look for.
- Print a test page… and if it worked you’re done!
NOTE: scangearmp (actually none of the apps) was not added to my Application menu. You’ll have to create a launcher and add it to your menu yourself, if you want.
If you want to know how to set this up on OSX, follow the instructions on the disk.
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Thanks, my computer is now connected with my printer perfectly (Linux Mint 11)
No problem Steve, glad I could help. I also wanted to post that this also worked with Ubuntu 11.10 64bit.
I tried this and could not get my printer to print. It looked as if it wanted to but the print job was just held after a while. I tried it connected through the USB but it could not detect the printer and I connected it through LAN/WIFI whichb looked more promising but no printing was done.
Any suggestions?