Installing A Brother MFC 7420 Laser Printer / Scanner in Ubuntu
Written by sean on July 16, 2008 – 6:30 am -I finally got rid of the little Dell 720 printer I’ve been using. It did kind of a crappy job, was slow and the ink ran out fast and was expensive. So the other day I bought a big whopping multifunction laser printer from Brother.
Brother actually supports Linux, so we can get the drivers which is nice. The scanner setup was easy as well and I have included it at the bottom. When you install your 7420, Hardy will detect it and set it up with the wrong printer drivers.
All you need to do for it to work correctly is got to Brother’s web site and download the Linux drivers.
Printer
First get the LPR driver here - Get the Debian Driver
Then get the cups wrapper here - Get the Debian Driver
Now open a terminal and go to where you downloaded the two drivers.
Install the LPR driver FIRST with the dpkg command :
sudo dpkg -i brmfc7420lpr-2.0.1-1.i386.deb
Now install the CUPS wrapper with the dpkg command :
sudo dpkg -i --force-all --force-architecture cupswrapperMFC7420-2.0.1-2.i386.deb
If dpkg complains, you may need to create a missing directory.
Now you should have a printer called MFC7420 and it should work just fine!
I have not tested the scanning portion yet, but I will and let you all know when I do.
Scanner
To get the scanner working all you need to do is download the scanner driver from Brother:
Make sure you get the correct one (which was the brscan2 32bit Debian file for me). Get it here.
Now install it with dpkg from the command line as well:
$ sudo dpkg -i brscan2-0.2.4-0.i386.deb
Now you should be able to open up xsane and scan away.
Tags: Hardware, printer, scanner
Posted in Hardware |
July 16th, 2008 at 7:12 am
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July 30th, 2008 at 4:57 am
Hi, thanks a lot. Worked fine!
July 30th, 2008 at 6:23 am
Excellent. Glad it worked for you
August 6th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
The configuration defaulted to the USB protocol. I have my printer attached to a USRobotics router/print server, so all I had to do to get it to work was:
1) Select MFC7420 in the Printer Configuration interface
2) Change the Device URI to ‘LPR/LPD Host’
3) Enter the IP address of the print server from the router, and the queue name (mine is ‘lp’) in the Printername field
Then it worked like a champ.
One note — I found a post that indicated a bug in the Brother CUPS driver that wouldn’t let you print on an A4 size page, so
I set the ‘Media Size’ to ‘Letter’ under ‘Printer Options’ just to be safe.
August 6th, 2008 at 8:56 pm
Thanks for the tip Dann, mine is attached via USB, but glad to know it works via print server as well.
As for the paper size, I’ve never printed to A4, but I’ve done some envelopes and weird size cards without problems.
October 31st, 2008 at 6:24 am
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February 11th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Worked great for me too, thanks for the concise summary!
February 19th, 2009 at 2:09 am
I guess I’m a little thick, but when you write
“Now open a terminal and go to where you downloaded the two drivers.”
What do you mean by “…go to where you downloaded the two drivers.”? I downloaded the drivers to a folder on my desktop, opened the folder, and entered the command in the terminal.
This is what I got back:
dpkg: error processing brmfc7420lpr-2.0.1-1.i386.deb (–install):
cannot access archive: No such file or directory
Errors were encountered while processing:
brmfc7420lpr-2.0.1-1.i386.deb
There is something very simple I’m missing, I can feel it….
February 19th, 2009 at 10:35 am
Leslie, open the terminal and go to the file.
in the terminal type pwd
this will tell you what folder you are in, probably your home folder. /home/leslie for example.
Now if you downloaded the files to your desktop, that is a different folder that would probably be /home/leslie/Desktop
you can get there from the command line by typing:
cd Desktop
then try running the commands. the command pwd will let you check the folder your in. use ls to make sure you can see the files that you are trying to install. ls will just give you a listing of files and sub folders in the current directory.
Give that a try and let me know
Sean