Installing printer/scanner driver from RPM

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1

Hello,

I’m considering buying a Brother MFC-J4540DWXL printer/scanner but since it’s quite recent I’m pretty sure I’ll have to install the drivers manually. They are available here: Brother MFC-J4540DWXL Drivere & Downloads | Brother

But how hard would is be to install them from .deb and .rpm packages? I downloaded and extracted the scanner driver already and it looks like there are a lot of files:

.
├── etc
│  └── opt
│     └── brother
│        └── scanner
│           └── brscan5
└── opt
   └── brother
      └── scanner
         └── brscan5
            ├── brsaneconfig5
            ├── brsanenetdevice.cfg
            ├── brscan5.ini
            ├── brscan_cnetconfig
            ├── brscan_gnetconfig
            ├── doc
            │  ├── LICENSE_ENG.txt
            │  ├── LICENSE_JPN.txt
            │  └── readme.txt
            ├── libLxBsDeviceAccs.so.1.0.0
            ├── libLxBsNetDevAccs.so.1.0.0
            ├── libLxBsScanCoreApi.so.3.2.0
            ├── libLxBsUsbDevAccs.so.1.0.0
            ├── libsane-brother5.so.1.0.7
            ├── models
            │  ├── brscan5ext_0.ini
            │  ├── brscan5ext_1.ini
            │  ├── brscan5ext_2.ini
            │  ├── brscan5ext_3.ini
            │  ├── brscan5ext_4.ini
            │  ├── brscan5ext_5.ini
            │  ├── brscan5ext_6.ini
            │  ├── brscan5ext_7.ini
            │  ├── brscan5ext_8.ini
            │  ├── brscan5ext_9.ini
            │  └── brscan5ext_10.ini
            ├── setupSaneScan5
            └── udev-rules
               ├── NN-brother-mfp-brscan5-1.0.2-2.rules
               └── udev_install

Having no experience with printers and little experience with nix, it looks a little complicated… Anyone has already done something like this? Are there packages I could look at for inspiration? Or is just a bad idea to buy that printer?

2

Are you sure you need to use that package? Modern printers tend to be supported by cups, which you can enable with services.printing.enable.

If it doesn’t support IPP, using a .deb won’t be trivial, but may be possible with buildFhsUserEnv and/or patchelf.

3

The scanner part is likely supported by the brscan5 driver which is available in NixOS (nixos-unstable):

  hardware.sane = {
    enable = true;
    brscan5.enable = true;
  };
4

For the printing part, I suggest using “IPP Everywhere” if possible.

Have a look at this: Brother DCP-572DW wrapper - #3 by peterhoeg