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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