Brother MFC-7860DW CUPS/postscript printing on Slackware

Posted by: Andrew Smith
Poster contact info: asmith16 at littlesvr.ca
Author: same as 'Posted by'
Software: Slackware 13.37

I got a Brother MFC-7860DW all-in-one printer, scanner, and fax last week, and the experience of installing it on Slackware almost made me switch to Ubuntu. The problem is that the lpr/cupswrapper deb packages provided by Brother on their website work great on Ubuntu (and printer works fine on Ubuntu after installing them) but the same refuse to work in Slackware, no matter how they are installed. I tried manually extracting/copying/running commands, alien --to-tgz, and rpm2tgz.

What ends up happening on Slackware is that the printer is detected and added successfully (remove the script-added USB printer if yours is network-connected) with the 7860 driver that's in the Brother driver selection box on localhost:631 (sometimes it's sorted in a weird place line the beginning of the list). Then I can successfully print the cups test page. And unfortunately that does not mean the printer is working.

I was not able to print from anything else. Not firefox, not a pdf viewer, not openoffice, not lpr. All I get if printing from those is pages and pages of garbage.

After a lot of pain I found a simple solution: don't use the drivers from Brother. Just use the Generic PostScript Printer driver that comes with cups. You will not get all the fancy features the printer supports (like, sadly, two-sided printing) but it will print :)

Maybe later I will find a better solution, for now I just wanted to post this since there does not seem to be any guides online about using this printer with Linux at all.

Also later I will try the scanner to see if it works.

Linux Home Automation

Posted by: Neil Cherry
Poster contact info: ncherry@linuxha.com, http://linuxha.com/
Author: same as 'Posted by'
Software: Brother driver version 1.0.0.0.0.0

I've just installed the Brother software (fax, scan and printer) on my Debian setup. I had to pull a bunch of scripts from my Fedora box as I was getting all sorts of errors about not finding certain filters (scripts) and such. You might want to contact me and I'll see what's where. Maybe we can figure out what you are missing.

I'm using xsane for scanning but it requires the Brother drivers. My setup is an amd64 (64 bit x86) setup but the Brother drivers are 32 bit. This required the 32 bit compatibility libraries.