Need help in using drivers for Brother printer

Help
1

I’m struggling to get printer drivers to working properly. Brother has provided deb and rpm packages, and I got it to install in CUPS by using an existing package and just replacing the deb package with the one for my printer. The driver shows up fine in CUPS and in KDE Settings, with the correct names and such, but it doesn’t work properly, as it can’t print a single document and only just makes the printer lights blink.

Also tried IPP if it might work, but the printer I have doesn’t support IPP.

2

I looked at my configurations and all of printing in Linux goes via cups service. meaning your user needs the permission/part of a group to be able to interact with it.

try adding to your configurations

  users.users.<your user name> = {
    extraGroups = [ "lp" ];
  };

Then log in and out or reboot for changes to take effect.

3

Still didn’t work, same behavior as before when trying to print.

4

How did you replace the existing package with the deb package for your printer?

5

This. I just replaced all the paths for the driver in nixpkgs with the paths from the driver I would like to install.

It has worked for me in the past with Epson drivers, but has not yet with the Brother drivers.

6

I don’t know the actual reason of why it is not working, but after inspecting two drivers (dcpt725dwpdrv-3.5.0-1.i386.deb and dcpt430wpdrv-3.6.1-1.amd64.deb), I can spot two main difference:

  1. The filename of the driver of your printer ends with amd64.deb rather than i386.deb (maybe unrelenting)
  2. Comparing the brdcpt725dwfilter file in dcpt725dw driver and brdcpt430wfilter file in your printer driver with the following commands after extracted the deb file with command dpkg-deb:
$ grep -a '/opt' ./dcpt725dwpdrv-3.5.0-1.i386/opt/brother/Printers/dcpt725dw/lpd/x86_64/brdcpt725dwfilter

returns /opt/brother/Printers//opt/brother/Printers/%s/inf/ImagingArea/opt/brother/Printers/%s/inf/PaperDimensionERROR: Reading pixels failed

However,

grep -a '/opt' ./dcpt430wpdrv-3.6.1-1.amd64/opt/brother/Printers/dcpt430w/lpd/x86_64/brdcpt430wfilter

returns nothing.

So this line may not work because the string /opt don’t even exist in the brdcpt430wfilter file

I don’t know why. I also tried to packages my printer like you, and downloaded some of the brother drivers already exist in the nixpkgs to inspect the difference, all of the br*filter file contains the /opt string.

7

This is the only brother driver I can find with prefix amd64.deb
https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=brother-dcp-t536dw

I am not sure, but according to the PKGBUILD file, maybe you can try something like this in the package modified for your driver:

--- a/pkgs/by-name/cu/cups-brother-dcpt430w/package.nix
+++ b/pkgs/by-name/cu/cups-brother-dcpt430w/package.nix
@@ -96,6 +96,12 @@ stdenv.mkDerivation (finalAttrs: {
     ln -s "$out/opt/brother/Printers/dcpt430w/cupswrapper/brother_dcpt430w_printer_en.ppd" \
       "$out/share/cups/model/"
 
+    mkdir -p "$out/share/ppd/Brother" "$out/share/cups/model/Brother"
+    ln -s "$out/opt/brother/Printers/dcpt430w/cupswrapper/brother_dcpt430w_printer_en.ppd" \
+      "$out/share/ppd/Brother/"
+    ln -s "$out/opt/brother/Printers/dcpt430w/cupswrapper/brother_dcpt430w_printer_en.ppd" \
+      "$out/share/cups/model/Brother/"
+
     runHook postInstall
   '';

I have no clue if it also does not work.

8

Tried it, didn’t work. Still same behavior as before. Shows up in CUPS properly as a driver, but when you try to use it as the printer’s driver and then attempt to print anything, it just makes the printer blink.

9

I tried using IPP drivers on Windows 11, and they worked, however, Linux Generic IPP drivers don’t.

I’ll try to make an issue in upstream CUPS, see if they have an idea as to what is up with my printers.

10

I looked around, and there seems to be an open pull request for the version bump for CUPS. I’ll wait for the package to update, then I’ll try to test the printer and see if it’s working.

11

You can test it immediately with something like this:

    services.printing = {
      enable = true;
      package = pkgs.cups.overrideAttrs (
        finalAttrs: previousAttrs: {
          version = "2.4.12";
          src = pkgs.fetchurl {
            url = "https://github.com/OpenPrinting/cups/releases/download/v${finalAttrs.version}/cups-${finalAttrs.version}-source.tar.gz";
            hash = "sha256-sd3hkaSuJ2DEciDILKYVWijDgnAebBoBWdEFSZAjHVk=";
          };
        }
      );
    };
2 Likes
12

Nothing directly to contribute here to solve your problem. Just want to let you know that I did something similar for a DCP-L3550CDW and it works nicely. See https://git.sr.ht/~bwolf/cups-brother-dcpl3550cdw.nix/tree/master/item/dcpl3550cdw.nix
Fiddling with all these pathes and verifying that they match the deb pkg is no fun. But in the end it was worth the pain.