Two laptops with F41 Silverblue - on one, my printer (Canon MF650C) works, on the other it doesn't

[silferas (John Doe)]

Hi, I’m desperate for help at this point—

so my work laptop (Dell Inspiron) has been running Silverblue since F37, and is currently upgraded to F41, still Silverblue. My personal laptop (Asus ROG G16) is running F41Silverblue as fresh install. My Canon printer (MF650C) works fine on the Dell laptop, but no matter what I try, it just won’t work on the Asus.

Additional info:

• printer is on my home wifi network
• Asus is connected through LAN cable to my router, though I’d tried disconnecting the cable and adding the router while on wifi (didn’t work)
• Gnome Settings on the Dell laptop claim that the printer is running as driverless. Printing works fine.

What I’d tried so far:

1. adding the printer through gnome settings (displays “failed to add printer”)
2. trying to manually install the manufacturer .rpm package through rpm-ostree (fails with the following journalctl entry:

Jan 04 15:14:56 zephyrus rpm-ostree(cnrdrvcups-ufr2-us.post)[65488]: Redirecting to /bin/systemctl restart cups.service
Jan 04 15:14:56 zephyrus rpm-ostree(cnrdrvcups-ufr2-us.post)[65488]: rpm-ostree-systemctl: Ignored non-preset command: restart cups.service
Jan 04 15:14:56 zephyrus rpm-ostree(cnrdrvcups-ufr2-us.post)[65498]: runuser: user xhost does not exist or the user entry does not contain >
Jan 04 15:14:56 zephyrus rpm-ostree(cnrdrvcups-ufr2-us.post)[65499]: (cnsetuputil2:12): Gtk-WARNING **: 14:14:56.488: cannot open display: >

3. attempted to add the printer through CUPS web interface (http://localhost:631/admin), which fails because I don’t have the PPD file (nowhere to be found in the driver .tar.gz archive I downloaded, couldn’t find one on openprinting.org either).
4. attempted to add the other similar entries through the CUPS web interface with language error message (en - contains invalid character).
5. EDIT: attempted to install the manufacturer driver through toolbox. The install.sh script ran without issues until I was prompted to add the desired printer, at which point I got this error message and the prompt window froze and became unresponsive:

 (cnsetuputil2:67205): dbind-WARNING **: 21:23:26.573: Couldn't register with accessibility bus: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.

Any suggestions on how to get this to work? Could someone more experienced please direct me to how I could locate the driver file on my Dell installation and perhaps try to port it to the Asus or some other way to make this work?

Thank you very much in advance.

[boredsquirrel]

How did you make the printer work on the old install?

I guess you could extract the ppd file from within the toolbox and add it to your system?

It could also be a firewall issue on the new system.

systemctl status cups.service please

Something basic

sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --add-service=cups && sudo firewall-cmd --reload

[silferas (John Doe)]

hi @boredsquirrel, thank you for replying to my request for help.

Here’s systemctl status cups.service result:

● cups.service - CUPS Scheduler
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/cups.service; disabled; preset: disabled)
    Drop-In: /usr/lib/systemd/system/service.d
             └─10-timeout-abort.conf, 50-keep-warm.conf
     Active: active (running) since Sat 2025-01-04 15:19:41 CET; 10h ago
 Invocation: 08fe5c4125894fb384ac152d705af5da
TriggeredBy: ● cups.socket
             ● cups.path
       Docs: man:cupsd(8)
   Main PID: 1764 (cupsd)
     Status: "Scheduler is running..."
      Tasks: 1 (limit: 37643)
     Memory: 39.6M (peak: 119.5M)
        CPU: 11.503s
     CGroup: /system.slice/system-cups.slice/cups.service
             └─1764 /usr/sbin/cupsd -l

Jan 04 22:37:37 zephyrus cupsd[1764]: REQUEST localhost - - "POST / HTTP/1.1" 200 188 Renew-Subscription successful-ok
Jan 04 22:45:57 zephyrus cupsd[1764]: REQUEST localhost - - "POST / HTTP/1.1" 200 188 Renew-Subscription successful-ok
Jan 04 22:54:17 zephyrus cupsd[1764]: REQUEST localhost - - "POST / HTTP/1.1" 200 188 Renew-Subscription successful-ok
Jan 04 23:02:37 zephyrus cupsd[1764]: REQUEST localhost - - "POST / HTTP/1.1" 200 188 Renew-Subscription successful-ok
Jan 04 23:04:24 zephyrus cupsd[1764]: REQUEST localhost - - "POST / HTTP/1.1" 200 188 Renew-Subscription client-error-not-found
Jan 04 23:10:57 zephyrus cupsd[1764]: REQUEST localhost - - "POST / HTTP/1.1" 200 188 Renew-Subscription successful-ok
Jan 04 23:19:17 zephyrus cupsd[1764]: REQUEST localhost - - "POST / HTTP/1.1" 200 188 Renew-Subscription successful-ok
Jan 04 23:26:57 zephyrus cupsd[1764]: REQUEST localhost - - "POST / HTTP/1.1" 200 157 Cancel-Subscription successful-ok
Jan 05 00:02:44 zephyrus cupsd[1764]: REQUEST localhost - - "POST / HTTP/1.1" 200 188 Renew-Subscription client-error-not-found
Jan 05 01:01:04 zephyrus cupsd[1764]: REQUEST localhost - - "POST / HTTP/1.1" 200 188 Renew-Subscription client-error-not-found

and the firewall command returns:

Error: INVALID_SERVICE: Zone 'FedoraWorkstation': 'cups' not among existing services

About how I made it work on the Dell laptop, I just added the printer from gnome settings and it worked out of the box. EDIT: important piece of info could be, that I set the printer up back in Silverblue 38 or 39 I think.

I checked the CUPS web interface on my Dell (the one it’s working on) and the driver listed is the

Canon MF650C Series, driverless. 2.0.0 (color. 2-sided printing)

The Asus laptop doesn’t offer 2.0.0 but 2.0.1 as an option, but that one requires the PPD file, which I can’t seem to find.

I’m fairly certain I didn’t need one when I was setting up the printer on the Dell laptop, as I usually document any fixes necessary to get my systems up and working that don’t work out of the box, as well as any customizations that aren’t done directly through the GUI, and I hadn’t found anything of the sort in my notes.

EDIT2: Additional info. This is the version I’ve been trying to add:

with this result:

[silferas (John Doe)]

Documenting solution and trouble I ran into along the way, in case others might find it useful:
First I copied the .ppd file from my other laptop (ran into issues while trying to install the driver through toolbox to scavenge the .pdd from there. Reason I even went with this option first was because I wanted to find out if I could fix this issue if I didn’t have access to a device that had the .ppd file already available. This could still be doable, as it was probably a user error, but I just didn’t have the patience to keep going).

sudo cp /etc/cups/ppd/MF650C.ppd ~

sudo chown <username> MF650C.ppd

went to [http](http://localhost:631/admin/) and picked “add printer”

had to pick the driverless one (the other options will be added just fine, but printing will be all jumbled)

and added the .ppd file in the next step. Finally:

I’d made a backup of the .ppd file in case I might need to reinstall the OS in the future.

EDIT: forgot to mention— as I also had other issues, I’d decided to reinstall my system (switched to bazzite as I mainly use this device for gaming), and the printer didn’t work out of the box on the fresh install either. Seems to me like something broke between older versions of fedora and the current one.