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I am dual booting my PC with Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04 x64. I do all my work in Ubuntu but have to use Windows occasionally because my printer, Canon i250 (USB) will not work with Ubuntu.

I have followed many installation guides but they all seem to be for 32 bit. Ubuntu recognizes the printer and even auto detects it but when I try to print it just sits in the queue and nothing happens.

I have an old Pentium 3 PC kicking around. Would I have better luck if I installed Windows XP on the old PC and used it as a print server or will I still run into driver issues on Ubuntu?

Back when I was using Ubuntu 8.04 32 bit my Canon i455 (it died) worked fine. Also since upgrading to 10.04 and 64 bit a couple of games I occasionally play stopped working in Wine. Not sure if it is 10.04 or 64 bit that is the problem.

My PC has 2GB of RAM although I have been considering upping it to 4 or 6 so I can run some virtual machines. Will Ubuntu 32 bit recognize 4GB or will it only give me 2.5?

Any advice is appreciated. I would like to dump Windows completely.

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  • I used to use a Canon i250 on a Mac and it worked fine. Both OS X and Ubuntu use CUPS. Do you get any messages in your logs? Unfortunately, I no longer have either the Mac or the i250 so I doubt if I can help further. You've asked multiple questions in addition to your titled one. They need to be posted separately and deleted from this one. Dec 8, 2010 at 1:12

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A lot of things go silly on 64-bit in wine. My solution was to run an XP or 32bit vm for usb devices that don't have working linux drivers because I don't want to have to deal with the package trash that comes with using 32bit packages on 64(it can be done. i've seen it, but i can't/won't put the time in to do it myself. i got weird symbol conflicts and compilation problems last time i tried). if you go with a 32-bit vm you can do usb passthrough. That's my recommendation.

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  • that doesn't solve you game problem, but you can always have a 32bit install dual booting a 64bit install or deal with the package problems Dec 7, 2010 at 10:35
  • I appreciate your answer. I'll give a try when I get home today. Dec 7, 2010 at 13:35
  • note that virtualbox ose does not support usb passthrough...you have to be using oracle vbox Dec 7, 2010 at 13:38
  • USB passthrough worked! I guess this is the next best thing to having it work natively. At least this eliminates having to reboot just to print! Thanks. Dec 10, 2010 at 10:25

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