Canon Pixma MP560 printer and Linux

When I bought this printer, I failed to find any Linux drivers for it. I must admit I didn't try hard to find them either since I was very much in a hurry at that time. Since then I had just assumed that drivers for Linux just don't exist.

But today I decided to search/try harder to get it working against my fedora laptop. The result was that I found the drivers very easily and after several minutes of efforts, I finally got it working! So I thought it blog about it and provide some pointers so process gets easier for others:

1. Ensure you have 'DefaultLanguage en_GB' line in your /etc/cups/cupsd.conf and your firewall isn't blocking Port 8611 for TCP/UDP.
   
2. Get the drivers from here. The drivers are available as rpm and deb packages.
   
3. Once you have the packages downloaded and installed on your system, find out the mac address of your printer somehow. The method I used was to watch for packets in wireshark and pinging the broadcast address of the network.
   
4. Once you have the mac address, Run this command as root:
   
   /usr/sbin/lpadmin -p MP560LAN -m canonmp560.ppd -v cnijnet:/${MAC_ADDRESS} -E
   
   Note that mac address bytes must be separated by '-' here rather than ':'.
   
5. Your printer should now be installed and working!