Brother Printer Drivers .... Can It Really Be Finally True ...... Long Read

[Frog]

As many of you know I have been having problems with my Brother Printer operations for more than a year ..... nothing seemed to work or at least not permanently and I would have to go back to Win 10 to do all my printing ....

I've tried so many different cures and suggestions I have lost track of them so I finally just gave up and used Win 10 which has always worked .....

My biggest problem is I have always had to use CUPS to configure my printer .... except one time when I believe swarf showed me a way to use a different printers driver .... which worked for a while and then I started having problems again ....

So for the past 3 days I have been going on YouTube to see what others have done to make Brothers work on Ubuntu ..... I found 6 different videos all showing about the same way to get it to print .....

I then remembered that in the very beginning I had tried to use the Zorin Brothers approach to installing a Brother Printer which these 6 videos show almost the exact same thing ..... so I went back and copied the Zorin Brothers instructions and tried it again ..... first installing the Installation Driver from the Brother Website for my machine ....

After a bunch of mistakes in the terminal ..... which is where you have to install it from I finally got the driver to install ..... fairly long installation sequence in the terminal ..... I came to the very last step .... choosing my UFI ..... which I copied from the UFI listed in the CUPS Property Settings ..... and that UFI was wrong ....

Now I'm totally beside myself thinking I have to do this terminal thing all over again ..... the instructions also say to restart your computer again after you installed the driver so in total disgust I shut my computer down and took a break ....

Here is the funny part I fired back up and a printer icon appeared in my taskbar so I went to System Settings and opened my printer settings .... there were now 2 printers listed there where before there were none ..... now remember I had made no changes to the terminal commands after they said the program failed ....

The first printer listed had what looked like the correct name that was on the driver folder in Downloads so I chose that one and did a test print ...... OMG it worked ..... so I chose that one as my default printer and disabled the 2nd ..... tested the printer and it worked again .....

If anyone is interested here are a couple of photos of first the error from the terminal and the rest of my new printer settings ......

Both Printers ..... highlighted one is now default .....

Default printer Settings

Second printer note the URI that the terminal said was not valid .....

Not to see if it will remain as my default printer and WORK ...... I am going to do a Rescuezilla back-up to insure that this will hopefully end my printing problems .....

[Frog]

I do have a question though ...... if CUPS does an update or upgrade will it change my printer settings or revert back to some other BS ?????

Next I'm going to try and get my scanner to work remotely ..... but as I have to get up and put something in the scanner to scan it .... it seems just logical to hit the scan button while I'm there to make a copy of what I need .... DUH ....

[Frog]

Well I knew it wouldn't last damn CUPS took back over the control of my printer ..... and of course it doesn't print again ..... it worked yesterday but today my Brother printer driver is gone leaving the cups one ..... and as I didn't get to make a back-up of my drive it looks like I will have to install the Brother driver again .....

But first I need to know what to do about CUPS ..... can I delete it and just use my Brother driver ??????????? ...... which means I will have to reinstall it again but does it need CUPS to make it work ??????

@#$%&*+!~ ...... god I hate computers sometimes .....

[Storm]

I have no idea. I don't have a printer

[Frog]

Ahhhhh ..... I see I forgot you have a cat who takes short hand for you .... your lucky all you have to do is feed him ..... I wish all I had to do is feed my printer and it would work ......

[rolltide101x]

Have you ever tried it on something like Fedora?

Maybe try and set it up on a live usb and see if an updated kernel helps.

It at least might give you some insight to if newer packages will help you. Then you can take it from there.

[Frog]

Thank you but I believe I have once again found a solution ..... so we'll see how long it lasts .....

The old saying "If at first you don't succeed ... try try again" ..... sorry but that person never tried to use Linux ..... it should have read "CHANGE" .....

I did try all morning reentering all my commands into the terminal to install the brother drivers .... and then tweak the settings in CUPS .... nada .... nothing worked .... I was going back through so old doc I have saved and ran across some terminal instructions someone had given me to keep CUPS from searching for drivers .....

Then I went back and changed my 1 of 13 choices in the brother terminal instructions to # 11 which read "Use IP Address" which I typed in to the terminal .... then I got "do you want to print test page" .... I typed Y .... it loaded a few more things and then I heard my printer start up .... OMG .... I nearly fainted ....

I kept getting a "Can not print ... can't find printer" before but I thought nothing of it because CUPS is supposed set everything up including the IP address .... but I guess when I disable CUPS from searching for drivers when I loaded my IP into the terminal it installed it for me ....

Before when I tried to enter my IP Address into the box that says "Device URI" it wouldn't let me ..... but thank god the terminal could ....

Gonna live this open for a while to make sure CUPS doesn't change it like it did the other day .... time will tell .....

Thanks for your reply .....

[zabadabadoo]

@Frog

god I hate computers sometimes

Only sometimes?

I hope your latest printer fix is more sticky.

[Frog]

@zabadabadoo

I hope your latest printer fix is more sticky

Me to ..... tried a print this morning and it worked just fine ..... I'm just concerned that the next time CUPS updates it won't reverse all my hard work and go back to using the CUPS default driver .....

But time will tell .....

[Frog]

Problem solved ...... please see this post ......

UNRESOLVED - Something to think about - printer

I solved the problem or rather with Nordvpn Support I solved the problem ...... after the CUPS update it recognized my printer model but still when trying to print returned a "Can not find printer" .... I contacted Nordvpn support and they found a solution for me ..... after several emails back and forth I entered a subnet address then sent me into the terminal and it worked ..... Been 4 days now with no problems ..... so I'll mark this problem solved ...... thanks to everyone above who offere…