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Re: brother printer/scanners

On 01/01/2017 09:29 PM, Gene Heskett wrote:

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.
What point would you argue? I was talking about the drivers which can be installed through the CUPS web interface or through the system-config-printer application. I was simply stating that there were no FOSS drivers in our (Debian's) repos for the scanner portion of these devices. Nothing to argue about, is there? If you can point out an exception, then sane.org would love to hear about it. They don't list a single Brother scanner device as being supported without proprietary software. 



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.
It's what I choose to do with my systems. Do whatever you wish with yours, and I'll do whatever I wish with mine. Again, you're arguing about an *opinion* which I stated clearly was an opinion.
And their drivers don't "just work" without doing some pretty wonky stuff to the system. You post about enough problems you have with unusual configurations that I'd think you wouldn't begrudge someone else wishing to avoid that sort of thing.
I gave credit where credit was due, and acknowledged that the installation script did a good job of installing working drivers for all of the functions. I just didn't appreciate the way it went about the job. Look below in the paragraphs you quoted. 


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.
For a far less secure way than you do what? Scanning? You're stating that you know for a fact that using the WPA-secured wifi connection between a smartphone and an applet on the smartphone for getting a scan from an MFC is less secure than installing proprietary software on your computer to accomplish the scan? Is that really what you're stating? I wouldn't care to spend the time and energy that would be required to prove the point one way or another.
But I am sure of one thing, using the smartphone or tablet to get the scan doesn't install software outside the approved Debian repositories on my Debian Gnu/Linux systems.
I'm not Chicken Little crying about a falling sky. I'm just happier sticking with software and drivers for which the computing community has access to source on my critical systems.
I don't worry a lot about my wife's smartphone and tablet. I consider Android devices to be compromised from the start. She transacts no financial, commercial, or legal business on those devices. The Debian systems here, on the other hand, get used for lots of business that we just don't trust to systems loaded with proprietary software.
It's not a religion; it's a preference. And I always try to be careful to distinguish between fact and opinion. Hence my advice covered use of FOSS-only software, use of a combination of proprietary software and FOSS software using manual driver installation methods, and use of the installer script which still installs a mix but does the job with a fairly heavy hand (again, in my *opinion*). 

JP
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