Brother Scanner problems and my fix

I hadn't needed my scanner (MFC-J480DW all in one ) on my 24.04 LTS installation until today and had trouble getting it going. I downloaded the newest drivers, extracted the package with engrampa and ran the installation program.

https://support.brother.com/g/b/downloadhowto.aspx?c=us_ot&lang=en&prod=mfc4800_us&os=128&dlid=dlf006893_000&flang=4&type3=625

This gave me a broken dependency for brscan-skey. I removed the package and reinstalled it with gdebi which fixed the dependency. I then tried simple scan which operated the scanner but gave me the message 'failed to start' and no image.

I then installed XSane hoping it would work. Again I ran the program and it operated the scanner but gave me failed to start and no image. I remembered having this problem last time, but couldn't remember my fix. So I tried a preview on XSane and the image showed in the preview. After that I tried scanning and it worked! Then I tried simple scan and that worked too. That made me remember it was how I got the scanner to work last time.

I am not sure why you have to do a preview to get the scanner to work, and simple scan gives you no option for a preview that I could find. Maybe this will help someone else struggling to get their scanner working.

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I will get into that struggle too sooner or later. Because my 3 in1 Brother is likely the same Type as yours. For now i don't know to handle with "preview", but we will see. For me the Linux way ist like to keep me updated and it is more a private Hobby-Project.

Well I have an update today. Yesterday was on my System 76 computer. Today I did an old Dell Inspiron (first generation I-core 5 so old) and that did not go as well. It would not install brscan-skey at all. I tried gdebi and got Error: Dependency is not satifiable libsane (>=1.0.11-3) today.

So I went to Synaptic to see what I could do. I checked what was installed on my other laptop and added th open source tool 'OpenScap Scanner Tool (oscap)'.

The rest of what I found installed was libinsane1, sane, brscan4, sane-airscan, xsane, libsane-common, and sane-utils. I logged out and back in and that didn't work. It wouldn't scan anything again. I then reinstalled linux-brprinter-installer-2.2.4-1 and rebooted.

I then opened XSane and did a preview. Now it scanned and saved. Simple scan then worked too, but with a quirk, it scans and saves, but gives me the message:

It is saved designated the scan (.pfd) to save and saved it, but simple scan does not recognize it saved it the scan. It keeps asking me to save the scan again so I just cancel the save multiple saves and shut simple scan down.
A bit weird, but the scanner is now working on both installations so even with the quirk on simple scan I am satisfied.

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Mine is a Brother MFC-J480DW. The latest driver software is < linux-brprinter-installer-2.2.4-1 >.

I use engrampa to extract it in Downloads then these commands in the terminal.

cd Downloads
sudo bash linux-brprinter-installer-2.1.1-1 (you have copy and paste the driver name from Downloads each time you use it or it will say file does not exist)
model no. MFC-J480DW
Will you specify the Device URI? [Y/n] ->n
Test Print? [y/N] ->y

After that it installs the scanner drivers, but
brscan-skey-0.3.2-0.amd64.deb will be a broken package. 'sudo dpkg --configure -a' did not fix the broken package but Synaptic 'fix broken' did. So I ended up getting this installation running without brscan-skey.

The only time I have not had the printer install was on Parrot OS and that was because everything was sandboxed which I do not understand. The scanner has been more of a problem.