Brother Printer install tool

[spanky]

My daily driver is UbuntuMATE 16.04LTS and my printer is on my wireless LAN. UbuntuMATE 16.04LTS never listed my printer and the recommended driver printed terrible copies so used a WIN7 or SOLIS machine when I needed perfect copies. I downloaded UbuntuMATE 18.04Beta and noticed that my printer was printing perfect copies so I knew there was a solution somewhere and hunted it down.

Finally got my Brother MFC-L2705DW printer to print perfect copies on UbuntuMATE 16.04LTS. I used the Brother install tool (released in 12/2017) linux-brprinter-installer-2.2.0-1.gz on their support page. You will have to drill down to your specific model and select linux (.deb file)
Brother printer drivers
It’s a Command line install and near the end It asked for a URI (since it’s on the net) so I took a chance and copied the URI from the 18.04 install and it worked, I installed simple scan from APP GRID application in the boutique and that works also.

[emjaycee]

That gives me hope with my MFC2710 then lol. I don’t seem to have any issues getting the printing part working. The local Brother tech did recommend a couple of additions being enabled in Synaptic and as long as I followed the Brother online method implicitly it did seem to install and work. The Brother tech also recommended I use the dnssd option when selecting the URI (around number 12 usually). But, I just tried scanning in 17.10.1 last night and it didn’t work as Simple Scan is available in 17.10 menu. From online reading it seemed I have to go through a few more steps to get scanning to work. Not worrying about it till 18.04 though lol.

[spanky]

I just checked my printer screen.

It used dnssd://Brother%20MFC-L2705DW._ipp._tcp.local/?uuid=e3248000-80ce-11db-8000-30055c86cde7
So the Brother coders know better than average NOOBI - me.
I went back to the Brother site and it does show the info for a MFC-L2710DW so you should be good to go.

If you follow the install tool exactly, it takes a while to load the whole and it does install the scan driver.
I'd sure like to use all of the other features such as the automatic two sided printing tthough

[emjaycee]

Yeah, the scanning side went through as well in the Brother install, but it still didn’t scan when I tried last night. Printing is my priority though. There may be a few other steps I need to make/take to properly enable scanning in Linux though. That can be explored later. The other interesting thing was that after I downloaded Wine I totally lost my ability to print. It took a number of goes at totally uninstalling both printer drivers and Wine to somehow allow me to get that right lol. Trouble is I don’t ‘really’ know what it is I did the second/third time to get them all to play nice together lol. If I had my time again I would definitely find a HP PRINTER lol. I think they tend to have the most reliable support. When I got my Brother, I didn’t even understand at the time that it really only supported Debian and Red Hat based systems! I really am a ‘newbie’… to both Linux AND computers lol.

[5461jonathan]

I appreciate your reply. I did finally get the software to install, but the printer did not respond to the print commands. I clicked the printer troubleshooter -- screenshots attached. I find it interesting that installation is so frustrating: why don't they have a plug-and-play feature, to make things easier for everyone? Even Snap would be great.

[jymm]

I have installed my Brother MFC-J480DW printer on 5 different laptops using Brothers installation tool. The only one I could not get working was on Parrot OS, but that was because everything is sand boxed and that is above my ability (Parrot is a more challenging OS in general) . The first time I installed it I to specified the URI and it failed. I uninstalled everything and reinstalled NOT specifying the URI and everything then worked. But I have not set up a network in my home. Still it maybe the problem.