HOWTO: Install Brother MFC210C

[crhooker]

Thanks for taking the time. I will start out with your system and give it a whirl. When I looked at the Brother site a few days ago it seems to me the drivers for my printers are the same as for yours. If so and it works well I will get back to you with any tweaks I might have made and you can update your HowTo with my printer model.

Thanks again.

carl

[crhooker]

bobsongs,

YOU ARE THE MAN!

I have the MFC3220C as I said in earlier posts. I downloaded the proper drivers from the Brother site, followed your directions to the letter, of course I called my folder mfc3220c and altered the files to run to install the drivers. And, hello, out comes the test page. Thanks, I will move on to your scanner install next. I also obtained fax drivers from Brother and may even take a stab at them.

I did notice that the setup was to network printer, not being sure what that was about I clicked the local button, tried another test page and it worked as well. If you know the difference I would appreaciate some insight.

Now that you have solved my printer issue how about taking a stab at my webcam??

[BobSongs]

bobsongs,

YOU ARE THE MAN!

I have the MFC3220C as I said in earlier posts. I downloaded the proper drivers from the Brother site, followed your directions to the letter, of course I called my folder mfc3220c and altered the files to run to install the drivers. And, hello, out comes the test page. Thanks, I will move on to your scanner install next. I also obtained fax drivers from Brother and may even take a stab at them.

I did notice that the setup was to network printer, not being sure what that was about I clicked the local button, tried another test page and it worked as well. If you know the difference I would appreaciate some insight.

Now that you have solved my printer issue how about taking a stab at my webcam??

Love it. I'd like to see my webcam going! It's a Logitech Clicksmart 820. I can download photos from it, no problem. But the moment I try to use it as a webcam my PC locks right down to the mouse movement. I'm sure it is a matter of a simple tweak as in the scanner tutorial. A number here, a small file there and boom: it works. But nothing yet.

Lunixfanboy's tutorial worked fine for my scanner.

[LxP]

Thank you very much for your efforts BobSongs. Thanks also to ubu69 for the useful information on getting a standalone network printer to function (i.e. one connected only to a hub/switch/router and not directly to any computer).

I am attempting to set up my router-connected Brother MFC410CN to print from Ubuntu and I am close; printing of test pages does not work however.

I think that the problem is that I can't modify CUPS settings through its web interface; it is disabled under Ubuntu 'for security reasons' and my attempts to enable it have been fruitless.

It's obvious that I want to select Network Printer from the Connection tab from the printer properties window. Do I want to select IPP or LPD though? I know that I need to enter an IP address somewhere; ubu69's instructions suggest that I want to select LPD but two text fields appear. You can't split an IP address over two text fields!

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

[BobSongs]

Thank you very much for your efforts BobSongs. Thanks also to ubu69 for the useful information on getting a standalone network printer to function (i.e. one connected only to a hub/switch/router and not directly to any computer).

I am attempting to set up my router-connected Brother MFC410CN to print from Ubuntu and I am close; printing of test pages does not work however.

I think that the problem is that I can't modify CUPS settings through its web interface; it is disabled under Ubuntu 'for security reasons' and my attempts to enable it have been fruitless.

It's obvious that I want to select Network Printer from the Connection tab from the printer properties window. Do I want to select IPP or LPD though? I know that I need to enter an IP address somewhere; ubu69's instructions suggest that I want to select LPD but two text fields appear. You can't split an IP address over two text fields!

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Thank-you, LxP, for your kind words. I just started this tutorial because a friend of mine tried Ubuntu and I wanted to give him a step-by-step. Since then others have added to it and as a community we've made it useful.

Feel free to post any detected errors in the command line installation or attempts to connect produce and I'm sure some kind soul will make the effort to fix what's broke.

[ubu69]

LxP,

Are you using KDE or Gnome (or something else)? Maybe we can figure it out.

One thing you might try is setting it up as LPD. In the first text box enter the IP address. In the second text box enter the name of the printer (the "queue" in LPD-speak). Or leave the second text box empty, if possible.

Just a stab in the dark.

I never had success with IPP. I figured it was because of the driver.

Is the CUPS web interface really disabled in Ubuntu? I've found it most useful on my iMac and Linux (Debian and Gentoo) machines.

Anyway, little baby steps. We'll all figure it out.

[LxP]

Thanks for your attention ubu69!

Are you using KDE or Gnome (or something else)?

I'm using GNOME. It's not much different from the standard Ubuntu installation (although I understand that you don't use Ubuntu).

One thing you might try is setting it up as LPD. In the first text box enter the IP address. In the second text box enter the name of the printer (the "queue" in LPD-speak). Or leave the second text box empty, if possible.

I'll try entering just the IP itself in the first box and in the second one I'll enter the host name as governed by the printer's settings. Please let me know if either of these are incorrect.

I never had success with IPP. I figured it was because of the driver.

Are there any major differences between the two? Coming from Windows, I'm not used to such choice (although as IPP doesn't seem to work, it's not exactly a choice anyway).

Is the CUPS web interface really disabled in Ubuntu? I've found it most useful on my iMac and Linux (Debian and Gentoo) machines.

It's not entirely disabled; it seems to be read-only though. When attempting to select an option that may modify something a credentials popup is shown which accepts no logical username/password combination, and then this message is displayed:

Unauthorized
Administrative commands are disabled in the web interface for security reasons. Please use the GNOME CUPS manager (System > Administration > Printing).

[ubu69]

LxP,

Are you able to view the help documentation in the CUPS web interface? I have found some answers there in the past. They give examples both using the web interface and the command line. Are you able to configure CUPS from the command line at least?

I tried logging in with GNOME to see if I could see what the GNOME CUPS manager is doing to you but my environment is set up differently and I don't even have it! Some help I am...

Give it a shot from GNOME and let us know how it works. Oh, and give the CUPS help a read. It will explain a lot. There is also a printing HOWTO buried in /usr/share/doc/HOWTO/en-txt on your system (at least it's on mine) or you can get it online at The Linux Documentation Project <http://www.tldp.org/>. You may get some answers there, as well (IPP, LPD and all that stuff).

After that you may have to futz around with the command line...

We're all learning together. The curve is steep but the support is there.

[LxP]

Well,

I'm not sure what I did but now everything's working for me.

Attached is a screenshot of my Configuration tab. The 10.0.0.2 represents my printer's IP address. I do remember entering BROTHER into the Queue field (which is what my printer advertises as its host name) but as this has disappeared, I don't know if that was necessary.

One thing that I feel is quite important to note: there is a much longer gap between the time that one creates a print job and the time that the printer responds (at least on this computer compared to Windows). I think that perhaps I was cancelling my test pages before they were reaching the printer; perhaps if I'd been more patient!...

Thanks again to ubu69 and BobSongs and to everyone who has contributed to this thread.

[shawndoggy]

Sweet, just wanted to get on record that I've successfully adapted these instructions to printing from a MFC5440CN which is attached to an XP box on my network.

First I installed the driver per these instructions, using brother's 5440CN driver.

Then I set up the new printer, following the dialog. Ubuntu found the printer on my network, and then I selected the previously installed driver to run the printer.

The only snag I hit was after that, the printer wouldn't work, even though it was shared on my windows machine. The wiki saved me there -- even though I don't have user authentication set up on the xp box for the shared printer, ubuntu wants to see "guest" typed in the user part on the network printer dialog. Once I did that, it worked like a champ.