RasPi and Brother Printer

[emeyeraway]

I followed "http://www.howtogeek.com/169679/how-to- ... -computer/" successfully (I thought), but when I tried to print, nothing happened. Searching the internet reveals that Brother printers are a particular problem, but as a beginner, I was not able to understand any of the "fixes". Is there any hope that I can get my RasPi 2B to print on my Brother MFC-J435W printer?

Ed Meyer

[fruitoftheloom]

I followed "http://www.howtogeek.com/169679/how-to- ... -computer/" successfully (I thought), but when I tried to print, nothing happened. Searching the internet reveals that Brother printers are a particular problem, but as a beginner, I was not able to understand any of the "fixes". Is there any hope that I can get my RasPi 2B to print on my Brother MFC-J435W printer?

Ed Meyer

There are no opensource drivers and Brother Drivers are for x86 architecture, the RPi is ARM Architecture

[pluggy]

Printers can be problematic on Linux, let alone the Pi, some manufacturers don't publish drivers for Linux at all and stand in the way of the community 'reverse engineering' Windows drivers. Never, ever, buy a Lexmark printer if you use Linux and value your sanity. If you're buying a printer for Linux, you can't go too far wrong with HP, they take Linux seriously. Many others write Linux drivers but only release the binary for X86 and then stand in the way of reverse engineering.....

[xoopha]

Most of what you can do when it comes to printers and ARM Linux is installing CUPS and hoping your printer is supported properly already.

[W. H. Heydt]

Sorry for this bit of a derail...

When I saw the thread title, my first reaction was...Shouldn't that be "Br'er Printer"?

[GreyCynic]

Sometimes you just need to be a little devious when setting up a printer. It is often the case that a print driver is compatible with more than one printer in a manufacturer's range. The trick is to recognise that compatibility often, but not always, works in both directions.

To find a driver for printer Y, look at the list of printers that printer Y's Linux X86 driver is compatible with. Look for a printer X in the list of compatible printers that has similar features to printer Y. If printer X is in the Pi CUPS driver list there is a good chance that this driver will also work with printer Y. Try installing printer Y using the Pi driver for printer X and print the CUPS test page. If everything works then you have got a good candidate to test further.

An incompatible driver will either produce nothing or result in garbage being printed out. If this happens then delete the printer that you just set up and try setting your printer up again using another driver.

When I set up a Brother HL-L2360DN network printer yesterday I found that the official X86 Debian driver for this printer listed around 40 compatible models. It took me about three tries and 30 minutes to get my printer working using the Brother 'HL-7050N-CUPS+Gutenprint' driver. This driver even gave me the chance to set up all the default preference settings that I expected to see.

There is no guarantee that this will work in every case but working with drivers through the CUPS configuration tool obtained by browsing localhost:631 is pretty straight forward and does not demand specialist skills.

[za3k]

This is now an open source drive that works on arm: brlaser, v6