Installing Brother DCP-7040 printer/scanner under CUPS
 

How do I go about installing a Brother DCP-7040 USB printer/scanner/copier into CUPS sane, for sacnning, under Slackware 13.0. I only find rpm and deb at the Brother site. I converted the .rpm to a slack pkg and installed, but no joy.

Can anybody guide me through this?

tj

open your browser of choice and in the address bar type "http://localhost:631/" and that will bring up the cups interface and from there you can install your printer in the Adding Printers and Classes area. Assuming cups has a driver for your printer.

Check the openprinting database for help in this:

http://www.openprinting.org/

You should try converting the rpm to tgz using alien. This has been discussed on the forum previously.

In my experience Brother drivers do not work in 64 bit so if you are using 64 bit you need to install multilib.

On my system, I used rpm2txz to convert the 64bit packages. However, to get scanning to work, I had to manually edit /etc/sane.d/dll.conf

The install script added "brother" to the end, but depending on which version of the drivers your MFC device uses, you need to change it to "brother2" or "brother3" or "brother4" whenever appropriate. I don't know why this isn't done automatically, nor was it documented anywhere easy to find, but this works for me now for both usb or network access.

Printing was much more straightforward to get working once the packages were installed, via usual CUPS configuration.