For some or other reason my Canon IP4500 printer simply stopped printing on my Ubuntu 12.10 box in the office. Accessing the Printers under the System Settings menu, I noticed quite a few broken print jobs in the print queue, and on closer inspection they all read ‘failed with error: PPD version is not Compatible with Gutenprint (xyz)’. It is possible that a recent update to the CUPS printing system must have broken something, but thankfully the Internet once again proved itself to be a hell of a helpful troubleshooting resource.
To fix, open a terminal (Ctrl+t) and run:
sudo /usr/sbin/cups-genppdupdate
This should generate a new PPD for your installed printer and if successful, you simply need to restart the CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) service, which you can do by running:
sudo service cups restart
And as luck would have it, problem solved!