Re: brother printer/scanners
On Sunday 01 January 2017 20:31:00 Jape Person wrote:
> 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'd argue that point. Brothers support for their stuff under linux may
not be precisely what you expect, but they seem to at least have a
stable interface. Install their drivers, and you m,ay have to fine tune
the colors or saturation (they seem intent on saving toner, but if you
keep telling by way of cups settings to use a little more as you go
along, you will eventually get decent color output. As for the scanner,
xsane found it and ran it the first time I tried it, with some stumbling
due to tcp packet checksum errors, it would send the scanner 6 commands,
they would be rejected because of checksum errors but the 7th attempt
was successful. This particular combo has its i/o interface buried
inside the unit, burning up 3 of the 5 feet a usb cable is allowed, so
rather than spending an extra $20 for a usb hub, (this places usb tree
resembles a weeping willow tree already) I had a spare 10 foot cat5
jumper so I plugged it into my switch and gave it a local address. I was
badmouthing brother because of the checksum errors, but one day, after
quite a few updates had been installed on this wheezy system, I noticed
the delay was gone, and on watching a tcpdump, the errors were gone, and
they have stayed gone. So it wasn't brothers fault. The combo machine?
an MFC-J6920DW, one of those monsters that also handles 11x17, scanning
and printing. For 11x17 prints, you would do well to build a chute of
some kind to guide the paper into it from the rear, its a cast iron
bitch to do it by hand even when using the guide tray I built. Sorta
weird, it does std portrait output in landscape, but it also feeds the
paper in landscape so the paper comes out sideways. The only thing it
doesn't do is spit out the paper as fast as the propaganda said it
could.
>
> 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.
>
That, considering that with their drivers, it Just Works(TM) seems like
cutting off your nose because it has a pimple.
> 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.
For a far less secure way than I do it.
>
> ;-)
Cheers, Gene Heskett
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
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