I have a Canon Pixma MP830 printer. This printer supports high resolution printing up to 9600x2400 dpi, but the gutenprint driver only supports 600x600 dpi.

So what do I do to make it print with higher resolution?

I wanted to use ddiwrapper, a system that would let you use the native win2k/winxp drivers from the manufacturer. Basically it uses wine to load those drivers feed the print job into the driver and feed the driver's output to the printer.

Note:

This is an incomplete solution. I managed to get as far as being able to install ddiwrapper and the driver. I didn't manage to actually print a test page. When trying to print the test page I don't get any errors, and the printing system reports printing has finished but nothing is actually printed.
I wrote this post in case there are others that might want to try this and maybe can find the final solution.

There were two problems with ddiwrapper:

1. it didn't compile on my system ( Ubuntu 9.04 x86_64 with Wine 1.1.25 ), complaining that : "Relocatable linking with relocations from format elf32-i386 (gdi32.o) to format elf64-x86-64 (gdi32.e8IuDu.o) is not supported" . This was fixed as soon as I added -m32 in a few Makefiles
2. the excanondriver utility that is used to extract the driver is meant to be used with executable archives, zip or lha files, but the driver for MP830 is just an executable so I modified this file to work with driver files from a directory.

The fixes to both problems are provided in the diff file bellow.

Compile ddiwrapper

apply the diff file [download id="13"] , compile and install:

Install the drivers

Insert the driver's cdrom that came with the printer, it shoud be automounted.
Copy drivers from the cdrom to a local folder ~/cdrv :

Delete the drivers for fax and scanner:

Move all drivers from ~/cdrv/Print to ~/cdrv :

Now install the driver:

Add the printer ( usb://dev/usblp0 should be replaced with whatever is the location of your printer) :

or you can use the Printing admin application from System->Administration->Printing and load the ppd file in ~/ddiwrapper/doc/ddiwrapper.ppd

Apparmor setup

Ubuntu 9.04 has apparmor installed, and there is a profile for cupsd. The ddiwrapper tries to access files that are not specified in this profile, but by looking at the error messages generated in the logs I managed to find all the files and add them to the profile. Here's a diff file with the changes I did : [download id="12"]

Apply the diff file to cups apparmor profile and restart apparmor:

Testing

The new printer should show up in the Printing admin and I thought I  should be able print a test page but it didn't work.
The README file for ddiwrapper mentions there is a way to "dry" test this by feeding the driver a ps file and verifying if the output is correct but there are no details about how to do that.
Now what ? Has anyone managed to make this work for Pixma MP830 ? Any idea about how to debug it ?