There previously was a MFC6490CW package some years ago in the nixpkgs repository (pull request). But it was removed due to inactivity and the code is now outdated. I have never made a nix package based on a deb package, so I don’t know how this stuff works. I asked ChatGPT to fix it, but I couldn’t get it working. Can someone please give me a fixed version that I can use in my flake.nix inputs or give me a way so I can use my printer on NixOS? Here is the driver page from brother if you want to make it from scratch.
I posted this already some time ago (use search). I went the same route. I needed a driver for the dcpl3550cdw, looked into what we have in nixpkgs and created this: bwolf/cups-brother-dcpl3550cdw.nix: NixOS package for pinter driver for Brother DCP-L3550CDW - Codeberg.org. You can do it too!
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Thanks I will try to implement it like you did. And I did search, but it did just not show up. I use my own searxng search with only privacy respecting engines, so the results can be a bit worse than google sometimes
I got something working. I don’t know if this is the best way to do it, but the drivers on my brother website are just really irritating to work with. This is the driver file I made eventually. With how I made it, I don’t think I could get it published on nixpkgs. The driver is built to save settings by writing to a file in /usr/local/Brother/Printer/mfc6490cw/inf/. On NixOS, the driver is stored in the Nix store, which is read-only. When you try to select A4, the driver attempts to update that file, but the write fails. Because it cannot save your preference, it defaults to its internal factory setting, which is A3 for this wide-format model. Hardcoding A4 into the file during the build forces it to use that setting every time it reads the file. I was not able to find a fix for this, so my package can only do A4, because of the hardcoding