Sunday, May 24, 2020

Brother Printer Setup Manjaro Arch

On my second setup with and old Brother HL-5250DN things went well without installing anything
Go to Manage Printing > Administration (the online cups setup)
Then the find printers, etc.
Worked flawlessly (sending job to printer takes forever :))

First setup was not so smooth.
You may need to install cups, etc but in the end . . . I needed this
... Get it from pamac with aur support
This will allow printing but only through this app
I can set up the printer but it will not connect.
I suspect I do not yet have the correct driver.
I can not get yay installed to find the driver

... a work in progress
I did uses these commands:
sudo pacman -S cups manjaro-printer sudo systemctl enable org.cups.cupsd.service sudo systemctl start org.cups.cupsd.service sudo pacman -S system-config-printer

There are multiple ways to find the IP of the printer.
The Brother app installed above is one.
Another is nmap
example sudo nmap -sP 192.168.1.0/24
You would need to find your own IP first to know the range to enter
example: ip addr show



This gets a little crazy.
But installing printers, even on Windows, can get crazy.
As usual, I didn't document every rabbit trail so not sure what was all necessary.
In the end . . . it may have been this that actually worked.
Notice that the Brother MFC printer always showed but when I chose it, and it appeared to be installed, it would always show no connection.
... When I chose the Internet Printing Protocol IPP method and manually entered the ip address, everything worked.
... I did install yay and tried to install the proper driver. It may have installed but that part was mysterious. The PKGBUILD of yay was even more mysterious but yay is available to me now.

Curl, Wget, Winget & Powershell Install or Download Commands

After the mess I made in previous posts this summary might be useful.     Thanks PatchMyPC, the great and powerful program downloader and up...