MadBuntu

A while ago, I wrote up a piece on how to install a Dell 720 Printer in Ubuntu. Last weekend, after a reinstall of Linux, I found my printer didn’t work. “No problem”, I thought, “I’ll just follow my own tutorial”. To my absolute horror, when I tried to do it, it didn’t work. So I started sifting through the message boards, and found alot of old info that didn’t help. Finally, I was able to get everything squared away, so without further ado, here is the updated and correct Howto for installing a Dell 720 Photo Printer under Ubuntu 7.10.

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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.