Slackware 14.1 64 bit
Brother HL-2230 printer

I installed cupswrapper and the brother hl2230lpr package that you can get from the Brother website. After doing so, I can see the printer in cups, and it is set to:

usb://Brother/HL-2230%20series?serial=A4N829749

Restart cups. Try to print. But when I print, either a test page from the cups admin utility, or from an application, nothing happens.

If I disconnect the USB cable, the job status is "Waiting for printer to become available."

If I connect the USB cable, it changes to "completed".

And nothing prints.

At this point cups sees it, it appears to be talking to the printer in that it can tell if the USB cable is connected or not, it thinks it is printing to the printer, but nothing comes out on the printer.

If I print a self test print page from the Cups utility, the printer light will blink a few times, but nothing prints. Print from any application - nothing prints. Printer queue list shows jobs completing normally.

Just for a sanity check I connected the printer to a windows box and installed the windoze driver and it printed fine. Printer seems to be OK. Slackware can see it, Cups can see it, but it won't print to it.

At this point I'm stumped. Anyone have any experience with this printer and know what it takes to get it to print?

So - remove drivers, reinstall. After all this is how you fix stuff with Windows, right? Remove, reinstall a couple of times and maybe it works. try this, try that. And lo and behold, after doing this a few times it magically started to work. And I have no idea what I did that finally got it working.

Actually, I used rpm2txz on the rpm files, and ran the intstaller from brother, and it worked. Weird.....

I'm having the same problem with my Brother HL-2040. The printer works fine under Windows, but under Slackware, I can't get it to print. I might be doing something wrong, I don't know. Last time I tried getting it working was a few months ago, but ended up giving up on it, and making due with just printing everything using a windows computer. It would be very nice if I could figure it out though, so I don't have to go through that trouble anymore

If you download the Driver Install Tool from Brother (http://support.brother.com/g/b/downl...040_all&os=127) and run it, it will download the LPR printer driver and CUPSwrapper in rpm format. It also gives a file not found error of some sort, and although it completes, you won't be able to print.

Run the uninstaller. Restart cups. Go to the cups admin page in your browser (http://localhost:631/). Make sure there is no brother printer there, delete it if it exists.

Run rpm2txz on both of the rpm files. Then run the Brother installer again, you won't get the file not found error this time. I have absolutely no clue if it was the presence of the .txz files that made a difference, but until I did that it would not work.

Why, oh why, don't they just give us a PPD file? Is that too much to ask???

The Brother printers from the HL-**** series all work fine under Linux. Just make sure you use the printers from their website.

On Slackware64, you have to install the basic multilib packages.

Here's a link to a little HOWTO I wrote about the HL-2030. It's in French, but you'll understand the listings:

http://www.microlinux.fr/slackware/L...CUPS-HOWTO.txt

UPDATE:

I did a clean install of Slackware 14.1 32 bit. I ran rpm2txz on the two .rpm files. I ran the brother installer. It ran without error, and the printer works. No tweaking, no coping files around, no doing anything. It worked right out of the box.

The only thing I did different from the many times it failed was to have the two .txz files in the same directory as the .rpm files. Still not sure that isn't just coincidence and it didn't start working by magic. But twice now that has worked.

Didn't you switch from a 64-bit install to a 32-bit install?

With my HL-2035, I'v downloaded the hl1250 PPD-file from http://www.openprinting.org/printer/...rother-HL-2040 saved it as /etc/foomatic/direct/hd2035.ppd, then run `foomatic-rip -P hl2035 file.pdf > /dev/lp`, without going through CUPS, since I don't need queuing and other fancy stuff. I reckon the filterHL* script from the Brother rpm should be able to do the same, eg. `/usr/local/Brother/lpd/filterHL2040 < pdf.pdf > /dev/lp`. If that prints, it is likely just an CUPS configuration error.

I have had a HL2040 running for several years on both 32 bit and 64 bit systems.

From cups, I'm using the hl120. BTW, no multi-lib on the 64 bit system.

This question comes up periodically. If you don't want to use Brother's drivers, you can print directly to the device. First create a Postscript file (file.ps) and then do:

su -c 'chmod gou+rwx /dev/usb/lp0'

gs -dNOPAUSE -dSAFER -sDEVICE=hl1250 -sOutputFile=/dev/usb/lp0 \
-dDOINTERPOLATE -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 -r600 file.ps -c quit

My Brother HL2140 works fine with the above command.
Ed

If you do want to use the Brother drivers, yet another HOWTO. http://docs.slackware.com/howtos:har...r_installation