Re: brother printer/scanners
On Monday 02 January 2017 00:51:11 Jape Person wrote:
> 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.
>
Neither do I, and the choice of printers you use, or scanners, becomes
considerably more limited when you eliminate the linux drivers supplied
by the devices maker, and which I feel I bought as part of the deal when
I dropped my card on the counter to pay for the device. That choice is
for you and I to make isn't it? I did think for a spell that epson was
good, but the last 2 epson printers I bought had head failures that
epson refused to do anything about because I was running linux. The
first one failed in about 6 months, the next one in under 30 days, head
clogs, so I jumped to a brother laser, which worked well for about 3
years, but the high voltage card went down. That is something I will
fix whenever I get enough stuff cleared off the workbench as I am a CET.
In the meantime this ink squirter is working fairly well, and if I need
to lay out a metal working machines logic diagram, the 11x17 cuts that
half a sheet of plywood covering job down to only 6 sheets of paper to
trim so edges match and mount on that plywood. I look at this one as an
interim solution to a need. Its not doing me any good if it doesn't
work, and if the maker doesn't want to support linux, then he just lost
me as a customer. Its his choice. I just want it to work, and brothers
stuff does.
As far as security is concerned, I run a router reflashed with dd-wrt.
Nothing comes in I don't invite. Period. My sons were here for a few
last summer, and I turned on the radio so their smart phones could use
it, set it up with the best keyfile security (I thought, WPA-PSK with a
2K key. I don't know which neighbor cracked it, and the path was not
into my system but out on the net.) So the only thing I noted was it got
slow, but when I got the net bill, my usage had jumped 50 gigabytes
without me doing anything unusual. Logging into the router I found it
had 2 dhcp clients. Nothing here uses dhcp. I could knock them out and
they were back in 3 seconds. Screw it, and turned off the radio. They
couldn't get to my stuff but they could sure burn up my bandwidth.
> 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
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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