Canon MG6250 Scanning on Xubuntu 12.10

The other day a friend of mine challenged me asked me if I'd got scanning going on the Canon MG6250.

I had never tried it, and some research showed other people were having some issues as well.

Here were the steps I took to get it going:

• Install xsane (sudo apt-get install xsane)
• The sane man pages refer to "backendname" a lot. The project's documentation gives the backend name for the 6250 as "pixma"
• man sane-pixma (seems to be a man entry for each backend) tells you to that network scanners should normally be detected, but if not, add them directly to /etc/sane.d/pixma.conf
• Edit that file and add a line of the format:

  bjnp://<ip_address>

  IP address can be retrieved from the printer settings dialog, or from the options in the printer itself.
• After adding an entry for the printer, save pixma.conf
• If the sane daemon isn't running (some have reported that it is running, but I had to start it manually as per the next two steps):
  • Edit /etc/default/saned and set RUN=yes.
  • Then start the sane service: service saned start
• Run xsane

Now xsane should discover the scanner, and instead of saying "no devices found" and dying, it should run up (brings up about 4 windows). All the default settings seem to work — just press "Scan".