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.
;-)
