Canon LBP2900 driver for macOS

A working driver for the Canon LBP2900 (LASER SHOT / i-SENSYS LBP2900/2900B) on modern macOS — including Apple Silicon — where Canon ships no driver at all.

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Works on Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3/M4) and Intel Macs across modern macOS (Sonoma, Sequoia, Tahoe — macOS 14 / 15 / 26). If you were looking for a Canon 2900 Mac driver, Canon LBP2900 macOS driver, LBP-2900 / LBP2900B driver for Mac, or how to install the Canon LBP2900 on macOS / Apple Silicon — this is it. One command and you're printing.

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The LBP2900 is a host-based (GDI) printer: it has no PostScript/PCL interpreter and only speaks Canon's proprietary CAPT protocol (Smart Compression Architecture / Hi-SCoA). Canon's official macOS packages only cover the LBP3000 and up, so the 2900 is left unsupported.

This project provides a CUPS filter (rastertocapt) that implements CAPT, plus a PPD describing the printer. It is built on the open-source captdriver project (GPLv3) with additional patches required to make the LBP2900 actually print on macOS (see The fix).

Status: verified working — prints real pages on macOS (Apple Silicon, arm64). Page-progress and out-of-paper reporting are integrated into the native macOS print queue.

What works

• ✅ Printing (600 DPI, all standard paper sizes, plain/heavy/envelope media, toner save, manual duplex)
• ✅ Fully bidirectional CAPT over USB via the standard CUPS usb backend — no kext, no SIP changes
• ✅ Live page progress in the macOS print queue (“Printing page N”)
• ✅ Out of paper status + notification; resumes when paper is reloaded
• ✅ Offline / disconnected reporting (handled by the CUPS USB backend)
• ⚠️ Not yet: distinguishing paper jam vs cover open (the underlying driver doesn’t decode those status bits — see Roadmap)

Requirements

• macOS with CUPS (every macOS has it). Tested on macOS 26 (Tahoe-era), Apple Silicon.
• Apple Silicon (arm64): a prebuilt filter is bundled — nothing to compile.
• Intel (x86_64): no prebuilt binary is bundled; the installer builds from source automatically. You need Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install) and autotools (brew install autoconf automake).

Install — one command

Plug in and power on the printer, then:

git clone https://github.com/duy12i1i7/canon-LBP2900-for-macOS.git
cd canon-LBP2900-for-macOS
./setup.sh

setup.sh does everything — run it without sudo (it asks for your password only when it needs admin rights):

1. installs the CAPT filter into /usr/libexec/cups/filter/ (writable data volume; works with SIP enabled) and the PPD into /Library/Printers/PPDs/…,
2. detects the USB printer and creates a queue named Canon_LBP2900,
3. sets up a self-healing LaunchDaemon so the driver survives macOS updates (see below),
4. installs the menu-bar progress app.

If the printer isn’t connected yet, everything installs anyway — just re-run ./setup.sh once it’s plugged in to add the queue.

Prefer to install the pieces separately?

sudo ./install.sh                 # driver + queue + self-heal
cd menubar && ./install-menubar.sh   # menu-bar app (no sudo)

Surviving macOS updates

A major macOS update can wipe third-party CUPS filters out of /usr/libexec/cups/filter/. To make that a non-event, install.sh keeps a persistent copy of the filter + PPD in /Library/Application Support/CanonLBP2900/ (on the data volume, untouched by updates) and installs a LaunchDaemon com.lbp2900.heal that runs at every boot and re-installs the filter/PPD/queue automatically if they went missing. So after an OS update, the printer just keeps working — no reinstall needed. (Verified by simulating a wipe: the daemon restores the filter on the next run.)

Usage

Print from any app and pick Canon LBP2900, or from the terminal:

lpr -P Canon_LBP2900 some-file.pdf
lpstat -p Canon_LBP2900        # queue status

Print status monitoring

There is no Canon-style floating status window — that’s a closed Windows-only app. Instead, this driver feeds status into the native macOS print queue window (System Settings ▸ Printers & Scanners ▸ Canon LBP2900 ▸ Open Print Queue, or the Dock icon while printing):

• Progress — “Printing page N” (PAGE: messages)
• Out of paper — a warning badge + notification (STATE: +media-empty); reload paper and the job continues
• Offline / not connected — reported by the CUPS USB backend when the cable is unplugged or the printer is off

Multi-page jobs (Word / Excel etc.)

The driver sends pages one at a time and waits for each to physically print before the next, and reports progress as it goes. The reliable ways to watch it:

• Menu-bar app (recommended, no Terminal): a tiny native app that shows 🖨 2/3 in the menu bar while printing. See menubar/ — cd menubar && ./install-menubar.sh (no sudo). This exists because Apple's own “Printing N of M” widget is frozen for this printer (see the note below).

• Terminal (most precise): run progress.sh:

  ./progress.sh          # prints e.g.  job #12 "Report.xlsx": printed 4/10 pages

  It reads CUPS’ job-media-sheets-completed (driven by the driver’s PAGE: reports and verified to advance in real time). From the macOS print dialog the total is usually known, so you get printed X / Y; a plain lpr file.txt may only show printed X.

• The pages themselves — one sheet ejects roughly every several seconds.

Note on macOS’ “Printing N of M” text — and why the driver can’t fix it. On modern macOS this counter stays frozen at “1 of M” for the LBP2900 (and any non-AirPrint / host-based CUPS printer). This was investigated thoroughly and it is not fixable from the driver, by design:

• The two CUPS job counters the filter does drive — job-media-sheets-completed and job-impressions-completed — were measured advancing correctly live (0→1→2→3) as each page prints.
• Yet the Apple UI ignores them. It even shows the correct total “of 3” while the CUPS job-impressions attribute is unset — proving Apple’s print proxy reads its page count from the spool document on the PrintCore side, not from the CUPS job the driver updates. So there is no filter-side attribute that can move “N”.
• Live per-page progress in that widget only works for AirPrint / IPP Everywhere printers, which report progress back over IPP. The LBP2900 is a raw USB CAPT/GDI device with no IPP, so it structurally can’t feed that widget.

The driver’s progress reporting is correct — use progress.sh for an accurate live count, or just watch the pages. The frozen widget is a macOS platform limitation shared by all classic CUPS drivers.

Troubleshooting

Enable verbose logging and watch it while you print:

sudo cupsctl LogLevel=debug
tail -f /var/log/cups/error_log      # lines tagged "CAPT:" are from this driver
sudo cupsctl LogLevel=warn           # turn it back off afterwards

• filter failed — check the filter is present and executable: ls -l /usr/libexec/cups/filter/rastertocapt (should be -rwxr-xr-x root wheel). Re-run sudo ./install.sh if missing.
• Job stuck at “now printing” forever (desynced page counters) — this usually happens after you cancel a job mid-print: the cancelled job never sends a clean end-of-job, so the printer’s cumulative page counters drift and the next job waits forever. Fix: cancel -a Canon_LBP2900, then power-cycle the printer (off ~10 s, on, wait for a steady green light) to reset the counters, and print again. This is a known captdriver behavior.
• macOS auto-adds a “Generic/AirPrint” queue — the LBP2900 has no AirPrint; use the Canon_LBP2900 queue created by the installer (it has the correct PPD).
• Blank or shifted output — pick the correct paper size (A4/Letter) in the print dialog; the printer needs ~5 mm minimum margins.

How it works

CUPS filter chain: app → PDF → cgpdftoraster → rastertocapt → usb backend → printer.

rastertocapt rasterizes each page into CAPT/Hi-SCoA compressed bands and streams them to the printer, using CUPS’ standard back-channel (cupsBackChannelRead) and side-channel (cupsSideChannelDoRequest) APIs for the bidirectional status handshake. That’s why it needs no kernel extension and no elevated privileges beyond sudo at install time.

The fix

Upstream captdriver registers the LBP2900 with a conditional status strategy (capt_get_xstatus / capt_wait_ready). That only fetches the extended printer status (CAPT command 0xA0A8) when the XSTATUS_CHNG flag is set — which this unit never sets. The per-page counters (page_decoding / page_out / page_completed) live only in the extended status record, so they were never refreshed, leaving stale/garbage values and hanging the end-of-page wait loops (the classic endlessly-looping 0xE0A0 status poll, captdriver#3).

The patch switches the LBP2900 to the same strategy the known-working LBP3010 uses — always read the extended status (capt_get_xstatus_only / capt_wait_xready_only). Once the counters are read correctly they converge (1/1/1/1) and the page prints. The same patch also adds the PAGE:/STATE: reporting described above. See patches/lbp2900-macos.patch.

This behaviour matches the reverse-engineered CAPT protocol spec (see captdriver/SPECS): the extended-status record (reply to 0xA0A8) carries the page counters at bytes 14–21, and paper-out is STATUS0 bit 1 / STATUS1 bit 14.

Build from source

Prebuilt arm64 filter is under prebuilt/arm64/. To rebuild (e.g. for Intel or a universal binary), see docs/BUILD.md. In short:

cd captdriver
autoreconf -fi && ./configure
make CFLAGS="-D_DARWIN_C_SOURCE -std=gnu99 -O2"     # -> src/rastertocapt

The captdriver/ tree here is upstream captdriver with the macOS/LBP2900 patch already applied, included both for one-command building and for GPLv3 source-availability compliance.

Roadmap

• Decode the cover-open / paper-jam status bits (STATUS2 bit 7 = “Problem” per the spec) to show distinct errors instead of a generic stall.
• Universal (arm64 + x86_64) prebuilt binary.

Credits

• captdriver by Moses Chong and contributors — the CAPT CUPS filter this is built on.
• The original CAPT reverse engineering by Alexey Galakhov, Nicolas Boichat, Benoit Bolsee and others (see captdriver/AUTHORS and captdriver/SPECS).
• macOS port, LBP2900 status-strategy fix, and native status reporting: this repository.

This is unofficial software, not endorsed by or affiliated with Canon Inc.

License

GNU General Public License v3 — see LICENSE. captdriver is GPLv3, and this derivative work (patches + built binary) is distributed under the same terms.