Today I purchased a Canon PIXMA TS8120, and as I was setting it up I was initially very pleased to see that Canon has official Linux drivers for it (debian and rpm). I downloaded and installed them with no difficulty. During installation the printer was recognized, and the printer was added to the available printers. However, that's about where the fun ended. It seems the driver has minimal support for the printer. It doesn't recognize that there are two paper feeds (a main tray and another feed in the top back). The intention is to allow the user to have normal paper in the main tray and photo paper in the top feeder so that either could be used depending on the print. But the applications I have tried (GIMP, LibreOffice, and Image Viewer) have the "Paper source" option greyed out. I've played around with several settings trying to get it to work, but it won't recognize the paper in the top feeder. And I can't set the print quality. I'm used to being able to choose "High quality photo," "Normal," "Best," "Fast draft," etc., but there are no such options for this printer. (I had those options with the HP Deskjet F4440). The only option I have is to print in greyscale, but it is not even a high quality greyscale.
So that brings me to my question: is it likely that further support for this printer will be added by the community (or even by Canon)? Or would I be better served getting a different printer? Also, is there any way that I can add those options manually? The Linux manual that came with the drivers mentioned lpoptions and CUPS web interface, but I haven't messed with those. I'm going to play around with them, but if anyone could share their experience with this situation, I'd appreciate it.
I would happily keep the printer if I could: choose the paper source when printing, set the quality of the print, choose fast greyscale or high-quality greyscale.
EDIT: After playing around with it some more, GIMP did automatically choose the top feeder for the photo paper, even though there was paper in the bottom tray also. I guess there's one item off my list
I still need to test the two-sided printing...
