I have been experimenting with Ubuntu recently. Must say the 9.04 package is far beyond expectations, especially when it comes to support for various hardware components. I installed the entire system in fully automatic mode and it discovered all connected hardware. It did not discover my Canon IP5200R printer, as it is not connected directly to any physical machine - being available on my home network over Ethernet instead.Canon does not provide any Linux drivers for the IP5200R, so I was rather skeptical about being able to run it... But the other day I tried.
First I connected the printer using the USB interface. Surprisingly Ubuntu discovered it and offered a list of potential drivers. The IP5200R was on that list, so I picked it. Then it offered to print a test page and it proved everything was working fine.
I knew the printer was assigned an IP address of 192.168.0.10 so now the task was to try to connect it without the USB cable. And the solution proved to be much simpler that expected... In the printer settings dialog in Ubuntu there is a Device URI field. It was pointing to one of the USB ports. I changed it to [socket://192.168.0.10] and... it worked. Printed a test page with USB cable unplugged and kept on printing everything else over the network...
Unix has this great charm of simplicity... Thinking of this later I realized this printer must have a simple LAN to serial converter, meaning the actual protocol of commands and data transmitted to it never changes... regardless of the physical interface (LAN / Wireless / USB). So it is logical, to enable printing via LAN, it should be enough to change just the port settings.
Worked for me too! :-)
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