Canon PIXMA MG2555 or MG2550 - making the scanner function work

First of all, have a very happy New Year's!

While I am completely content with my Brother HL2240D printer, and it still works quite well, I have had to additionally install a Canon PIXMA MG2555 (quite similar to the 2550) for unrelated reasons, and I have had one heck of a time getting it to work right on my Linux Mint 17.1 system. I finally figured it out. I write this in the hopes that I can spare you hours of fruitless searching.

Disclaimer: because I have spent so much time messing around with this, it is possible that my printer configuration is different than yours. I don't think it will be an issue, but please be aware that I haven't tested this solution on a fresh install. If it doesn't work for you, that may very well be why.

Basically, using the drivers available on the Canon website (use the 2500 series printer driver and scanner mp Debian Packagearchives), I was easily able to set up my printer to print from Linux. The Scanner function did not work. At all. It was not recognized whatsoever. In order to scan things, I had to boot into Windows, scan my document, and then transfer it over. That was a huge pain, and always felt just a little bit wrong.

It turns out that for me, after hours of messing around with it, the solution is incredibly simple. For some reason, the native scanner application with Linux Mint will not recognize your MG2555. It just won't. What I didn't realize was that the scanner driver comes with its own interface - either I just missed that information, or else nobody made it at all clear. Once you have your printer printing, and your scanner driver installed, all you have to do is run scangearmp (which is what you just installed) in the terminal (you must have your MG2555 plugged into the computer and turned on), and you can scan documents with this program. It's nothing fancy. So far, I haven't found any option to do a multidocument scan, for example, but it's there and it works, finally. You can of course add scangearmp to your menu (right click on menu → configure → open the menu editor → new item, and then put scangearmp in the command box).

Given that your scanner driver is lacking a few essential features, it may be worth your while to check out pdfshuffler as a solution. I just installed it yesterday (so haven't really tested it too much), but it seems quite effective at collating PDF files and allowing you to rearrange the pages. Definitely install it from the official repositories (Menu → Administration → Software Manager), as it is safer and more reliable (don't download it from the link).

Finally, I should say that I do not recommend the PIXMA 2555 for the Linux User. It has reliably handled intermittent light use,  but the ink cartridges are rather expensive (I find), it is incredibly loud, it is very slow, and it does not interface well with Linux Mint.

I would also like to recognize the contributors to this forum who mentioned the key information about the scangearmp command, allowing me to write up this blog entry.