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.

Brother BrGenML1 for CUPS
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:

Connect the printer to the network
Connect the printer to your network as descibed in the network section of the printer model's Online User's Guide. In this step you will know the printer's network address needed for CUPS in the next step. When pointing your browser to the printer's network address it will take you to the printer's user interface.

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

Use cups' web interface to install the printer
Printer detection works much better if the printer is directly connected to the computer than via network. So if possible connect the printer to your computer and point your browser at localhost:631. In the CUPS for Administrators section of the home page, click on Find New Printers and it will list the available new printer(s). Then, in the printer's line item, click on Add This Printer. On the next screen, accept or adjust name, description and location and press Continue. Complete the dialog with manufacturer Brother and the correct driver where you click Add Printer.

Then disconnect the printer from your computer. In CUPS dialog, for the just installed printer, click the Administation drop down menu and select Modify Printer. On the next screens, select LPD/LPR, enter the network URL, click continue, select the previously installed "current driver" and modify Printer.

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

External resources
http://solutions.brother.com/linux/