I've recently obtained a Brother MFC 9180 printer/fax/copier for free, but have had no success using it in Debian. The CUPS drivers for models similar to it do not work ( either they don't make the printer print or make it print postscript source without carriage returns ).
On the Brother site I found "Macintosh PPD drivers" for the printer. Hooray!
It turns out they were in compressed DMG form
. A quick dmg2img and loopmount fixed that.
It took a bit of extraneous nested folder trawling to find the file in there that contained the needed drivers:
BrotherMLDrivers.mpkg/Contents/Packages/Brother_MonochromeLaser.pkg/Contents/Archive.pax.gz
I wondered what the .pax was. After ungzipping it, I found out it means the archive is stitched together ( eg like tar ) with cpio. After extracting that, I had to perform another wild goose chase to find the right PPD file:
Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/Brother MFC-9180 CUPS.gz
Finally! The home-stretch! Or so I thought. The PPD requires a raster engine which is also in the CPIO archive,
rastertobrother730. I extracted it out and changed the location for it in the PPD to suit. Now I have another error from CUPS:
Idle - /usr/local/printer/brother-MFC-9180/filters/rastertobrother730 failed
First of all, this rasteriser is not cleartext, but a compiled program. I believe I'm on the wrong architecture for the binary:
Code:
D [03/Mar/2011:19:32:36 +1100] [Job 84] /usr/local/printer/brother-MFC-9180/filters/rastertobrother730: Exec format error
Is there anything I can substitute in for the official raster binary? Help would be appreciated.
Attached is the PPD. It is too long to put inside CODE tags.
