Printing and Ubuntu and the Gimp

I’m afraid this one might end poorly.

My printer is a Canon i850 photo printer, for which there appears to be no linux driver.

I can install a printer, from “System” “administration” then “Printers”. According to this document I can designate the Canon BJC 7004 as a close cousin — in Debian, another flavor of Linux. After giving that a try, I am able to print help documents from Ubuntu.

When trying to test the photo printing capabilities using “The GIMP” the Canon i850 and BJC 7004 are nowhere to be seen in the printer list. The GIMP, a photo editor, seems to use its own printing system apart from the printer driver I installed earlier. Trying to print from the Gimp just give me an error “lp:Error- no default destination available.”

Reasearching futher the following works, or seems to — I get printouts anyway.  Here is what I did:
From the Gimp, choose “File” then “Print”
In the print dialog box, click “Setup Printer” Choose “Canon” as printer make, “Canon BJC 7000″ as the model (this was a wild-ass guess) maybe another choice would work too,
Then in Printer Queue, select the named printer I created earlier. Not the “Default Printer”
I was able to print, but at a pretty low resolution, maybe 300×300. Color dithering is apparent in the printout.
But, Hey, I have a printout, so that is good, right?

Way back in the darkest recesses of my basement, there lurks an old — VERY OLD — HP 540 color printer. I might just have to drag that out to see what happens. Assuming it still works.