Another round with this new platform. My mom uses a desktop computer with a Canon Pixma printer/scanner, and I wanted to get this to work. I found a thread on askubuntu which referred me to the cannon europe site. There I downloaded the debian package listed as MG5400 series IJ Printer Driver Ver. 3.80 for Linux (debian Packagearchive). I untar’d and cd’d into the directory, but when attempting to run ./install.sh, I got the error:

dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of cnijfilter-mg5400series:
 cnijfilter-mg5400series depends on libtiff4; however:
  Package libtiff4 is not installed.

This is a problem with the old canon drivers looking for an old libtiff. Mint has libtiff5, but no libtiff4 in its repositories. I was able to grab a libtiff4 deb archive from the debian repos. I’m using an amd64 processor as most people so in my case I needed libtiff4_3.9.6-11_amd64.deb. After getting that and running sudo dpkg -i ../libtiff4_3.9.6-11_amd64.deb I was able to continue by running the canon ./install.sh normally.

Getting the scanner to work was a little surprising. It doesn’t work with xsane or simple-scan, but when I got MG5400 series ScanGear MP Ver. 2.00 for Linux (debian Packagearchive) from that same canon-europe site, it worked. Again, I got the tarball, unpacked it, ran the ./install.sh (this time without a problem). From there I had to run the command scangearmp in the shell, which opened up the program and let me start scanning images. As I said, I wanted my mom to be able to use this, so I created a desktop launcher to start it (and used /usr/share/icons/Mint-X/devices/48/scanner.png for the icon).

I was looking for a distro to put on my girlfriend’s parents desktop. They’re not very tech-savy and have had their fair share of malware and virus issues using windows for years. My first choice was Ubuntu since it’s what I’ve used in situations like this in the past. However, their computer was a fairly old eMachines that Ubuntu couldn’t live boot with for some reason. Now, I’m sure I could’ve gotten Ubuntu to install, but given the users of the computer, I really wanted something that I was sure would work with minimal modifications for a long time. So, I took a shot and made a Linux Mint 17.1 (Rebecca) disc.

Linux Mint booted with no complaints and installed painlessly. Everyone found Cinnamon intuitive, simple, and easy. However, Firefox was freezing, not on the live boot, only after the install. I looked around and found this forum which said to switch to gdm. This worked.

The package manager and software center was also really straight forward. Since my goal was for this to relieve the endless headaches of windows without too much of a learning curve, I was happy. I installed it as a dual boot on my dad’s lenovo laptop he mostly uses for web browsing and it’s running smoothly there too.

When I need to install an easy-to-use linux distro, I’ll be reaching for Linux Mint pending some disaster.

P.S. Unity confuses new users too much to be worth their trouble most of the time.