LinuxQuestions.org - [SOLVED] It's happened! My Brother laser printer no longer works in Slackware

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It's happened! My Brother laser printer no longer works in Slackware

It used to work perfectly well using Brother's proprietary driver. Cups has been warning for some time that old usb printers are going to stop working and that seems to have happened now.

What happens is that cups passes the file through and it disappears from the queue but nothing actually comes out of the printer. In my experience, that usually indicates a printer driver error.

The cups error file in /var/log is full of errors and warnings that I am using obsolete technology.

The same printer works out of AntiX without any problems, using a non-proprietary driver called brlaser. I'm going to try building this in Slack tomorrow; there is a slackbuild for it but it needs cmake, which I don't have installed at the moment.

If that doesn't work, I will just have to do my printing out of AntiX. Fortunately I only need to print occasionally, which is why I bought a laser printer in the first place.

Oops! I had another look at that cups error file and saw, hiding among all the warnings and spurious errors (missing this and missing that), a genuine error that I could understand. A missing filter in a non-existent subdirectory of /usr/lib64/cups. I do have the file in the /opt tree, so I put in a link to it and we shall see if the printer works tomorrow.

If that FAILS, but your ANTIX is a different physical node, you can set it as a print server and export that printer and print to it from the SLACK machine over network.

If your Brother laser printer is like mine, it does not need CUPS or Brother's drivers. Ghostscript can read the Postscript file and output PCL directly to the printer.

Code:

su -c "modprobe usblp; chmod gou+rw /dev/usb/lp0"



gs -sDEVICE=hl1250            \

  -sOutputFile=/dev/usb/lp0  \

  -dDOINTERPOLATE            \

  -dNOPAUSE                  \

  -dSAFER                    \

  -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4      \

  -r600                      \

  $file                      \

  -c quit

If hl1250 does not work, try hl1240.
Ed

hazel,

The latest version of CUPS is 2.4.7 or similar, so your Brother printer should still work using Brother's proprietary driver.

CUPS 3.0 is overdue and is not expected any time soon.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/CUPS-3...cture-Overhaul

I think I know what happened now. Those links got lost in the transfer to the new drive. I couldn't transfer the library directories via a memory stick, they were simply too big, so I more or less recreated them by reinstalling everything.

Another thing that got lost was Alien Bob's multilib aaa_glibc-solibs, without which the filter won't work anyway. I do have a stored copy of this package but it is the 5th release and I've just updated glibc to its 6th in the monthly update. So I checked on Eric's site and he doesn't have the new version yet. While I'm waiting, I'm going to build brlaser and try to use that instead of the Brother driver. After all it works in AntiX. And knowing now that I can always print out of AntiX if I need to means there is no tearing hurry.

Actually I would be quite pleased if I could get rid of multilib glibc. I don't run a multilib system apart from that and I have never felt happy with having it for glibc only. It's an extra complication and glibc is absolutely basic, isn't it. Nothing works without it. And if anything goes wrong...

Ok, alarm over. I built and installed brlaser and switched the printer to use it. Then I successfully printed a test page.

Quote:

Originally Posted by hazel (Post 6497017)

Actually I would be quite pleased if I could get rid of multilib glibc.

You probably can: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...64-15-0-38601/

Quote:

Originally Posted by rkelsen (Post 6497055)

You probably can: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...64-15-0-38601/

Yes, that's more or less what happened when I used the printer in AntiX for the first time. I was quite surprised that it "just worked", because I didn't have the Brother drivers on that system. Then I discovered that it was using a 64-bit cups driver called brlaser that I'd never heard of before. Today I built it on Slackware (there's a slackbuild for it) and now both my systems print in the same way. I don't need the proprietary driver any more and I don't need 32-bit glibc. So good came out of evil:).