It misses some information that should result useful. Nevertheless I see 3 family of solutions:
You can install a Virtual Machine (Virtualbox
) on your Ubuntu with a working Windows operative system, install the printer following the usual procedure from your university and after share the printer with your computer. There are many tutorial about different version of Windows. The advantage is that you can fully use the normal procedure. You emulate a machine (hardware) and not the operative system. If the Virtual Machine is up you can download a pre-made system too. Follow, e.g., this post to have other news about it.
You can try to install the driver through wine
. I see more problems because this time you go to emulate the system and explorer have to connect with a probably dedicated interface and install the driver in the emulated system. So it seems to be a specific task and I don't know how much it can be tested. This doesn't mean it cannot function.
From another computer with installed that printer you can obtain the IP address and the other parameters you should need. Else, since you have the authorization to print, at least you have the possibility to put physically your hands on the printer: from the panel option on the printer you may see the IP address. Often in the universities this can be even more easy: the IP can be directly written on the printer, or on the network plug.
- If it is a fixed IP, you can try to install in Ubuntu the printer as a network one. Via
CUPS
. With those parameter
Driver: Ricoh Aficio yyy foomatic/plx mono (reccomanded)
yyy is your model or one compatible
Connection soket://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
(the IP you read before)
Fixing by hands the parameter for Media source, double side printing, quality and so on...
- If it is a DHCP printer it should be more tricky. With Samba you can discover the printer in the network and after you should obtain a connection like
Connection dnssd://RICOH%20Aficio%ZZZZZZZZ_pdl-datastream._tcp.local/
instead of "ZZZZZZZZ" there will be your model/id of printer.
The latter way is possible only if the administrators did not close the printer with a firewall, or did not set the printer to accept jobs only from their queue.
Note. Once that you obtain the IP of your printer you can probably enter in the internet page of your printer (!). http(s)://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
always the same IP of before. (I don't remember if it is encrypted or not, http or https). It's even possible that you can download from there the driver too.
General consideration: IMO it's impolite, even if not unusual, that a University forces the use of a proprietary software to access a shared resource.
Additional References
This is not simply a "me too" post. I have been researching for a year and a half, in detail, how to make my Canon ImageClass D420 laserjet all-in-one work with Linux. Bottom line - Try the latest drivers (2.7 - June 2013) from Canon then sell your Canon and buy something that works! If time is money, and you value either one, sell it sooner rather than later.
I started out with Ubuntu 12.04 (64-bit) only to find that almost no one had succeeded in getting many of the Canon Laserjets to work. I kept at it with countless hours of research and eventually got the printer to work on a very marginal basis. I apologize that much of that 64-bit knowledge was "dumped" or became dated with semi-annual upgrades as I ventured into Mint Mate (Xfce desktop) with 12.10 and Xubuntu (Xfce desktop) for 13.04. But the same issues with Canon drivers persisted. During June '13, Canon released their 2.7 drivers. I was pleased that my LaserJet worked right off the bat (as well as it ever did). However, I still needed to shut off the power to the printer between print jobs to get it to work.
Since so many users encountered most of their problems with 64-bit versions, I decided to go with 32-bit Xubuntu (excellent!) for 13.10. This download from Canon (look for your specific model) includes .deb files for:
cndrvcups-ufr2-us_2.70-1_i386.deb and
cndrvcups-common_2.70-1_i386.deb
I think the common file needs to be installed before the ufr2 (if it doesn't work one way try the other). Next, printer settings have to be set to recognize both your printer and the connection, not as easy as one would think.
My settings:
Description: Canon D400-450 (UFRII LT)
Connection: usb://Canon/D400-450%20(UFRII%20LT)?serial=SJ3026
Device URI: Canon D400-450 ver.2.7
After a lot of tinkering, sweat, cursing and time, the Canon doesn't work any better than it did with my first frustrating experience a year and a half ago and three separate Ubuntu installations later. Yes, I can print some of the time - if I shut it off between print jobs. I have great difficulty printing .pdf files from my browser or email. I can work around this (most of the time) by printing to file first - then printing the .pdf from my local file. However, just today, I printed a 30 page .pdf document. It printed 30 pages of solid black! Never did get it to print correctly using all my tricks. After giving up on it and trying to print a USPS mailing lable, I noticed my CPU indicator was PEGGED and task manager told me 'C3pldrv' was using 90% of the CPU capacity. After closing all programs and rebooting everything was fine - and the printer spit out my mailing label without being prompted.
The bottom line of four installations and tons of research is that the Canon LaserJets and all-in-ones should be avoided like the plague. But then, you wouldn't be reading this had you bought something else. And that is just the printer portion of this Canon. I have had absolutely NO success with the scanner. The Canon scanner tool does not work with this machine. "No devices recognized" I have tried so many SANE front ends back ends and upgrade tricks it has driven me in-SANE. The one ray of hope for the scanner is to use VueScan ( a fantastic (low-riced) scanning application which was developed with Ubuntu ) with their recommendations. I am going to try that again as I found it at a critical moment when I actually had to get some work done other than trouble shooting the Canon. Good luck - I'll follow up with more info as I get it.
Best Answer
As you've said, Kodak don't currently distribute Linux drivers for their machines, but the internet is a vast place, and, thanks to the amount of more advanced users using Ubuntu, their are some available.
They are not official, nor are they overly tested, but they do sometimes work.
Unfortunately, there are known bugs with the C Series printers. Fortunately, you can download and install for free, here.
The project is called c2esp, for future reference.