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Linux Mint 15 and Brother printer

  • 27-11-2013 10:58pm
    #1
    zagmund
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 2,501 ✭✭✭


    I have Linux Mint 15 and a Brother DCP-J4110DW wireless printer but I can't get the machine to talk to the printer. I can talk to it from Windows no problem so there's no IP issue, on the printer side at least.

    I downloaded the Brother printer driver from Brothers website and installed it.

    Under add printer it automatically populates the Brother printer there - so it can talk to it. It automatically picks the "BINARY_P1" queue - which is running on TCP 9100. When it asks for a driver, I point it at the Brother PPD file and it all *looks* OK.

    But then when I go to print a job nothing happens. According to the print dialog it went. It's not queued, there's no error. It just looks to all intents & purposes that it has printed. Except it hasn't. Nothing happens on the printer. It doesn't even do any sort of wake up. Nothing.

    Any ideas where to start troubleshooting this issue?

    The device URI in the printer dialog says "lpd://<hostname>/BINARY_P1. I changed it to the IP address, just in case, but still no joy. Sending jobs from applications shows them appearing in the queue and then disappearing . . . so something is happening, but sadly not printing.

    Any suggestions?

    Thanks,

    z


Comments

  • #2
    danny2012
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 13 ✭danny2012


    I have had the same problem, the solution I found, unfortunately was to go back to windows. The printer is not not printing, if you are having the same problem as I had, rather it is taking a day or so to print a page. It seems to be common with brother printers.


  • #3
    zagmund
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 2,501 ✭✭✭zagmund


    Hmmm, you got me thinking. I fired up wireshark to see what traffic was passing between the two hosts and it looks pretty much like there's only SNMP going back and forth. There's nothing on TCP9100.

    The SNMP is triggered when I hit print - it looks to get the status from the device, check ink levels, etc . . . The device replies (so it is contactable) and then nothing happens in terms of connecting on TCP9100 and sending the print job.

    I'm a bit out of touch with the whole world of printer drivers - is there some totally generic (equivalent of Epson FX80 of old) driver I can use to at least print something? Once I get a basic print job going I can hopefully move up the chain and use something a little more sophisticated like postscript. I don't want to send a postscript job out of the blue - I've seen that churn through hundreds of pages before.

    In other words, if I was to start from scratch and forget about the Brother driver, what is the normal "safe bet" driver I can use?

    Thanks,

    z


  • #4
    zagmund
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 2,501 ✭✭✭zagmund


    We have a result. I can now print. Check out "I'm finding it difficult to install the printer driver" in this FAQ - http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/bsc/public_s/id/linux/en/faq_prn.html

    In short - download & unzip this - http://www.brother.com/cgi-bin/agreement/agreement.cgi?dlfile=http://www.brother.com/pub/bsc/linux/dlf/linux-brprinter-installer-1.0.4-1.gz&lang=English_lpr - and then run it as root.

    It said it needed to download something like 250 packages and use about 80m, so I have no idea what is involved. The net result of downloading the stuff and pointing it (the install) at the IP address of my printer is that I can now print.

    The FAQ mentions two other things which I think may be related - check out the entries for "I'm using a Linux 64 bit edition. Can I use the Brother Linux printer drivers?" & "All print jobs are aborted and nothing is printed (1)."

    From what I can tell there are a couple of dependencies which are not satisfied by the normal install and (something along the lines of) the file is written to a spool directory that doesn't exist. The driver doesn't notice and thinks it has queued the file, and then the print server sees no file to send to the printer.

    z

    [edit] in one of my early trials today I pointed a generic PCL driver at the PCL queue on the printer - when I sent it to print the printer would wake up (make noises, light up the display), think and then do nothing. I also saw traffic on TCP9100, so at least something was happening. However, the traffic that was being passed didn't look like a print job to me . . . again, pointing to the idea that the job was being spooled somewhere that didn't exist.


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