Comment by snuxoll
10 years ago
I can't say it's been any "easier" to connect to my Brother MFC-J4420DW on Fedora as it is on Windows, but it's no harder. Download the installation script from Brother, run it, it asks me for the hostname of my printer and I'm up and running.
> Download the installation script from Brother, run it, it asks me for the hostname of my printer and I'm up and running.
But this is already sounding archaic and difficult isn't it? Just download and run an installation script? Give it the host name? No way a nontechnical user is going to be able to do either of those things.
Why doesn't the printer just appear like it does on my Mac? I'm not even sure what my printer's host name is so I wouldn't even be able to do that step myself!
However worse that installation may be on Linux compared to your Mac, it pales in comparison to the atrocious Windows experience.
"Download this .ZIP file from the Brother website. Then unpack it somewhere. Go through these dialog boxes from the Devices and Printers control panel. Be sure to uncheck such and such before clicking next in such and such. Then at this point, choose "Have Disk" and browse for where you unzipped the drivers and find the ".inf" file in there somewhere."
If the printer is on a dynamically assigned IP address, chances are that the port created for it will use a hard-coded entry like "192.168.1.13" which will break. The DHCP host name requested by the printer can be used, but you will have to manually enter that. It is some awful serial number: a mixture of random digits and letters. It's better to navigate to the printer's web firmware first, and rename it to some human-readable name, then edit the printer port to match.
> If the printer is on a dynamically assigned IP address, chances are that the port created for it will use a hard-coded entry like "192.168.1.13" which will break. The DHCP host name requested by the printer can be used [...]
Personally, I've never understood this. Are there a lot of admins who let their printers take IPs from the DHCP pool?
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Exactly. On my Linux systems, it's just like your Mac (and considering that CUPS is owned by Apple and used on Macs just like on Linux, this makes sense): you just let the printer appear when it searches the local network, and select one of the already-loaded drivers. Why would you need to download some "installation script" from the manufacturer? How ridiculous.
I just got a Brother LED printer: the HL-3170CDW. Very nice printer. Works fine on with one 64 bit Win-7 system. With another system, a 32 bit Win-7, it won't work at all. Printing a test page fails with 0x000000D, and no application can print. (The printer is seen, and its status can be monitored and so on, but Windows just won't print!) This is whether or not it is on Wi-Fi or USB. I tried three versions of the drivers, and every possible remedy: I applied a Microsoft HotFix for repairing Win7/SP1 systems. I ran sfc /scannow. I run chkdsk /F on the C: drive. (The machine is an older system, but the SMART info shows that the drive is in perfect health: low temperature, no bad sectors.) I reset Windows Update and got it into a sane state. I went through every possible trouble-shooting procedure that could be googled up that could be related to the issue. Fixed things in the registry according to various steps. No dice.