On 01/01/2017 07:38 PM, Joel Rees wrote:
I got a Brother printer to work by installing both the debian packages from the repos and the deb from Brother's website, but the scanner still isn't being found. Running Wheezy. Would anyone care to tell me what steps they took to get scan functionality on their Brother multifunction printers?
I imagine the exact process you want to follow would depend on the exact device you bought.
I just went through the process of hooking up a Brother MFC-9340CDW (color laser with scanner, etc.) to my home network.
Here's the deal. If you use either the CUPS localhost:631 functionality or system-config-printer, you will probably be able to find a driver that will work for the printer portion of the device. I found that the MFC-9320CDW (Note the slight difference in model number.) Foomatic PostScript driver worked best among the open source drivers available from the repositories for my particular printer.
I'm pretty sure that nothing from the repositories will drive the scanner portion of this device or any other multi-function printer currently made by Brother.
I'm not content to install their proprietary stuff to make the scanner work, so I just use the thing as a printer and copier. If I really need to use the scanner function, one of my wife's Android toys can use the scanner via wifi, and then she can e-mail the resulting document to me.
I did, however, test the proprietary drivers for the MFC-9340CDW on a Debian testing system before yanking them off and reverting entirely to FOSS.
Brother provides a number of different ways to install the mixture of open source and proprietary drivers they provide on the support site. If you are in the least bit persnickety about the way installers work, you won't like Brother's installers. They use a lot of dpkg --force-install crap and stick stuff like 32 bit libraries onto your 64 bit architecture so that you will see warnings scroll by and start wondering why you bothered with this.
The funny thing is that the worst of these installers, a script which installs everything possible via download, actually does the best job of getting all of the parts of the device to work -- assuming that you don't make a wrong choice somewhere during the installation procedure.
I tried installing just the scanner software from the proprietary software along with the open source foomatic driver. That worked pretty well, but only after some trial-and-error with the instructions.
If you do any of Brother's manual install procedures, watch out for the typos in their instructions. Some of the mistakes in the documentation are really, really ridiculous. Even an intern in the support division should be able to write instructions that distinguish properly between usb and network connections.
Also, if you do install the Brother proprietary stuff, run debfoster immediately afterward to confirm that you want to keep all of the parts and pieces of the drivers and their libraries so that your package manager won't try to throw it all away the next time you run a full-upgrade.
Good luck! Or just use the open source printer driver from the repository and use your smartphone for scanning.
;-)