On Wed 09 Mar 2016 at 15:16:20 +0200, Jarle Aase wrote:
> My plan is to install the Brother drivers in a virtual machine. When that
> works, I can use wireshark to see what's actually being sent to the printer,
> and decide if I want to do something to make it work on the "real" machine.
Let's take a step back and examine the issue.
1. You have a Brother printer which uses a non-free driver. Initially
you took a wrong step and could not print. Knowing now that two .debs
need to be installed the least you could do is install them. I'd
suggest using the USB connection to avoid having to complicate
matters with having to think about network connections. The .debs are
set up to use a USB connection anyway. The .debs can be purged after
printing has been tested to work with them.
Can you print now?
2. You are very uneasy about having a proprietary driver for printing on
your machine, so are seeking a way not to use it and have only standard
Debian/Linux drivers. (For unknown reasons you have no such problem
with a proprietary driver for scanning. That seems a little perverse
but we'll go along with).
3. AirPrint on the printer has been mentioned a couple of times but has
not resulted in any reaction from you. Is there some reason you would
not want to use the facility? It is the only way to avoid having a
proprietary driver on your machine and be able to print.
4. You can examine the printer's Bonjour broadcasts with avahi-browse;
it is in the avahi-utils package and the command to use is
avahi-browse -art
It would be useful for us to see what you see so please would you do
avahi-browse -art > discovered
and attach a gzipped discovered to your next mail here. We can then
go from there.
