Brother networked printer

This document covers the installation of a Brother network printer. It covers only the networked installation taking the DCP-750CW as an example. It may be applied to other network printer of Brother.

Feedback
After having applied this guide to your printer, please update the following table :

cups
You also need cups installed

The cups service must be started before you can install the driver!

OpenRC
If you use OpenRC use the following command to start the cups service.

To have it started automatically at boot time:

Systemd
If you use systemd use the following command to start the cups service.

To have it started automatically at boot time:

Drivers from an overlay
If your printer is supported by an ebuild in brother-overlay or some other overlay you should use it, because it contains all the prerequisites mentioned here and you could skip the section Drivers rpm installation.

The net-print/brother-genml1-bin ebuild from brother-overlay contains the Generic printer drivers offered on support.brother.com the for a wide range of compatible models.
 * Generic LPR printer driver (rpm package)
 * Generic CUPSwrapper printer driver (rpm package)

Drivers rpm installation
As the drivers are available from Brother in the form of .rpm file. You need to have the  package installed.

Missing directories
Please create these directories before all, it will save you a lot of trouble.

Downloading the driver from Brother
The drivers for Brother printers are available at Brother solutions' web page. Search for you model name by clicking Printer driver in the Download box. After having chosen your model you will be presented four drivers for download. Please download the two ones ending in .rpm that are LPR driver and cupswrapper driver.

Installing the drivers
Installing the drivers may be a multiple steps process as some needed directories may appears missing on your Gentoo installation. To install a driver change to the directory where you downloaded the .rpm files. Then issue the following command to visualize the filenames.

Of course the driver names may change according to your model's name. Using the previous command will allow you to copy and paste the filenames in the rpm command to avoid typos when entering them.

First install the LPR driver.

You may be told that some directories are missing. In this case, try to add the missing directories by hand and re-install the driver with this command:

I had to add the directory and re-install:

Then install the ...cupswrapper... driver the same way:

You may be told that some directories are missing. In this case, try to add the missing directories by hand and re-install the driver with this command:

In my case, I had to add and

Copying the filter at the right place
Copy the filter to the right place with the following command:

Start the cups service
To install the printer you have to start the cups service first:

Use cups' web interface to install the printer
Point your browser at localhost:631. In the CUPS for Administrators section of the home page, click on Add Printer and classes. Then, in the Printers box, click on Add printer.

In the network choices suggested, choose the Host or LPD/LPR printer protocol and enter the connection url as suggested in Brother's documentation. In the case of DCP-750CW I had to use lpd://192.168.1.13/binary_p1 where 192.168.1.13 was the IP address of my printer read from the command panel of the printer.

Normally cups should be able to find the printer by itself. It will use an address similar to lpd://printername/binary_p1. This way you don't have to assign static IP addresses. Unfortunately this won't work out of the box. Cups receives this broadcasted name but can not resolve it. To get this working the two packages net-dns/avahi and sys-auth/nss-mdns have to be installed and you have to change the address to lpd://printername.local/binary_p1. (Adding the .local suffix)

After, this the configuration is completely intuitive and free. Just follow the instructions of the wizard.

Configuration and Maintenance of the printer
Connect the printer to your network as descibed in the network section of the printer model's Online User's Guide. Then point your browser to the printer's IP address or to its url as configured in your router and it will take you to the printer's user interface.

sane-backend
You will need to have the package sane-backends installed in order to install the driver for the scanner. As you will probably need xsane to scan your document, just emerge it. sane-backend will be pull in as a dependency.

Installing the driver
Download the driver from the Brother Solutions's download page for scanner.

Change to the directory where you downloaded the file and do:

in order to be able to copy paste the name. Enter the following command:

Configuring the scanner
Once the driver is correctly installed, use the following command:

Now check everything is correctly installed:

Congratulation! You are ready to use your scanner!

Generic LPR printer driver on amd64
The printer driver uses statically compiled x86 binaries. To be able to execute them your kernel needs to have the following configuration enabled: IA32_EMULATION

Text shifted up
Sometimes it happens that the text is shifted up toward the upper border of the page. To correct this, enter the following command:

Scanner not detected
It may happen that, when you launch xsane the scanner is not detected. This is probably due to a too recent version of libusb. In order to solve this, you need to emerge libusb-compat