Hi,
I have (successfully!) installed and shared my Brother HL-1440 laser printer via CUPS. It seems to be working great, except after a few minutes the printer goes into "sleep" mode which essentially shuts off the printer.

lpstat tells me: Unable to open USB device "usb://Brother/HL-1440%20series": No such device

This behavior is how Brother designed the printer to work, apparently. With the windows driver connecting directly to the usb, any print command will "wake" the printer back up. I tried creating a shell script that checks if the printer's disabled, and tries to re-enable it, but it can't enable the printer if it can't communicate with the device!

Is there a way for me to send a command to the USB port to wake the printer up?

AND, if this works to wake the printer up, is there a way for me to make that happen whenever a job hits the printer's queue?

Thanks, but this suggestion did not work. The system could not communicate with the printer at all when I tried to install it at usb://dev/usb/lp0. This was not even an option in the CUPS setup, but I could install it to that location in the KDE utility.

http://www.linuxprinting.org/piperma...q4/000427.html
... in this case the sleep mode interferes with printer aquisition on boot.

This dosn't seem very common, though it pops up from time to time.
The standard workaround is to leave the printer switched off and turn it on when you want to print something. The printer informs the hotplug system that it is available and everything connects.

Presumably the printer(/fax/copier) expects to receive a wakeup signal when a job is ready - this sort of thing is typically handled by the driver. CUPS suggests three drivers for this printer - I'd fool around with the different drivers and their options to see if there is something to enable this or if one of the other drivers handles this better than the default.

Unfortunately this is not a very good solution for my situation (trying to use the machine to serve printers).

Strangely, since I have re-installed the printer using foomatic+hl1250 (suggested), the wake-up function seems to be working. Is there any explanation for this, or should I assume that it may break again as mysteriously as it was fixed?

Thanks for your help Simon

http://www.linuxprinting.org/show_pr...rother-HL-1440
http://www.linuxprinting.org/executi...cution+details
... for more information.

It is possible that the driver just didn't load properly.
Brother make proprietary drivers for their printer/scanner combos too.

Of course, as this is to be an "always available" printer - perhaps you could disable the sleep function at the printer.

I have this feeling that it will continue to be fine; but if you remove it and then reinstall it, the wake function may vanish again. It is possible that the auto-functions in cups need to see a particular "thing" from the printer and the timing may be a little out so it gets missed.

(The likes of windows drivers will just assume a "sleep" printer is present and send a wake signal regardless - CUPS will be checking to see what driver options to set.)

Yes I noticed this. The proprietary drivers probably fix it but my system does not have LPR & LPD installed, and I wasn't really sure how do do it since dpkg kept erroring saying that I should use CUPS instead.

I didn't exactly want to wade into that one because it was already kind of working.

Thanks again,
bk