Canon printer refuses to print in colour - Yast configuration different from CUPS

I have a Canon Pixma MG5250 connected to my setup which is KDE/Plasma.

When I try to print a colour print it comes out grey scale. If I go to Yast → Printers, I find that it is configured as Color model : Greyscale: I try changing it, and it won’t alter. (Click OK - go back in and it hasn’t changed. Log off - log in, no change)

I opened the CUPS server (localhost:631) and reset the printer configuration to default. This gives me Color Model: CMYK. If I open the KDE printer module I get the same result.

And I try printing again… the result is Greyscale.

In desperation I uninstalled Yastprinter (the module that configures printers). It still prints Grey scale, while CUPS still tells me it should be printing CMYK.

I suspect Yast is overriding CUPS - which it shouldn’t.

How do I undo this mess? I’m not going to re-install yastprinter CUPS and KDE config are enough.

Supplementary question : how do I override, temporarily default settings? I’ve had problems in the past getting it to print greyscale b/w and no colour.

I used this printer model a couple years ago and nowadays I am using a Pixma MG4250, so a very similar device.

May I ask how you installed the printer? Did you use the rpm package from the Canon homepage?
For both printer models they provide a proprietary driver with a shell script for installation. It is long outdated which creates the need to install some outdated packages (libraries).

I just recently installed my MG4250 on my laptop and found all needed packages for tumbleweed, a few of them of course are just from the community. But now it works fine.

When I was installing it on Arch LXQt (no printer config except CUPS) I ran into similar problems like you that I couldn’t resolve. Canon doesn’t provide a shell script for Arch, so my guess is that it’s connected to the installation process.

Cannot edit my post anymore. Therefore I leave this here:

Edit: In case you need the download link: PIXMA MG5250 - Support - Download drivers, software and manuals - Canon Europe

There are two tar.gz zipped packages for installation (one .rpm and one .deb) and one more zipped package with a guide.

For installation of the printer (USB and network) you can unzip the RPM folder in which you will find a shell script. It’s interactive and will guide you through the printer installation.

It will most probably show you some errors because of dependencies that are needed. For me I needed to install libpangox-1_0-0, libprotobuf-lite23_3_0, libprotobuf23_3_0, libtiff3 and pangox-compat from the community (found by internet search as 1-click-install) and maybe one or two more from the official repos.
But that was for my MG4200series driver.

After successful installation you should be able to configure the default settings with CUPS.

Thanks for the link - I’ve downloaded the little package.

Hitherto, I’ve let CUPS use the open source driver without any problems - just plug in the printer and let CUPS get on with it.

It’s a fresh install from official sources - hitherto I’ve used Gecko, but it kept getting bricked on update. It’s the first time I’ve used Yast to configure it (which I suspect is the mistake) - the Gecko install did not include the printer module for Yast.

I think I tried installing the MG5250 in a couple different ways and it never was fully satisfactory except when I used the proprietary driver.
But my first contact with that printer on Linux was quite a few years back.

Nowadays I find it sometimes a bit annoying to get all these old packages as dependencies but for me it’s still the best practice to get my printer working.

You technically just have to run the shell script from the RPM folder in a terminal after unzipping it. Then it will give you above mentioned errors that point towards the missing dependencies. But once you installed those it works, at least for me. Also the wifi configuration is fairly easy with this script. I hope you will succeed.

Install finally went alright but I’ve come up against the printer is not registered use lpadmin - I think it’s more CUPS can’t see the driver…

It can’t be made to work - the driver package is 13 years old and the configuration file system has completely changed /etc/init.d doesn’t seem to exist any more.

It’s way beyond my capabilities to find out how to do it.

Thanks for your help

I finally tracked down cups-printers.conf (think it was that) and found a line option:monochrome which is strange because cups uses “grayscale” for the same thing.

I removed the line and things sort of worked thereafter. But it’s clear that the Yast printer module is not working properly.

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