Installing my new Brother MFC-7820N

I bought a Brother MFC-7820N; although I do not currently intend to use the fax capabilities, the device is good in all aspects, I assume. What especially impressed me is the Linux support Brother gives.

The device is not attached to my server – instead, it is directly attached to my network via LAN (it comes with an Ethernet interface.

Installing the device within Windows was no problem – the drivers come on a CD (I had to disable my firewall, though, and set up quite a lot of rules after that).

Now, for Linux, there are a few steps to follow. In general, the Linux page from Brother Solutions is the starting point.

All the drivers are available as *.deb packages and as *.rpm packages. Various sources on the net recommended to use the rpm-sources (there are a few source-code packages, but they do not seem to work well). So, first thing to do is thus to emerge rpm.

OK, now for the printer piece. First thing is to install the lpr drivers (sources here), following these instructions. The output is:

Vorbereiten... ########################################### [100%]
1:brmfc7820nlpr ########################################### [100%]

Next thing is to install the cupswrapper drivers (sources here), following these instructions. The output is:

Vorbereiten... ########################################### [100%]
1:cupswrapperMFC7820N ########################################### [100%]


Now, after restarting cups, the printer is showing up, but with two errors: First, cups assumes it’s attached to an USB port, and second, there is an error saying “brlpdwrapperMFC7820N” for printer “MFC7820N” not available: No such file or directory”. So, to tell cups the MFC is reachable on the network, I followed these instructions here ; and to fix the error message, I found this FAQ entry. After restarting cups, the printer works!

Next thing is to make the scanner available in sane. The drivers can be downloaded here; then I followed these installation instructions on installing them. I had to use

rpm -ivh --nodeps brscan2-0.2.4-0.i386.rpm

rather than the command given in the instructions (i. e. I had to insert the –nodeps option). This was the output:

Vorbereiten... ########################################### [100%]
1:brscan2 ########################################### [100%]

Finally, I exported the device as “mfc”. Funny enough, I could not select the device in kooka, but I emerged xsane and it is working flawlessly there.

Another fine piece of work – thanks Brother, for giving us Linux-users all this support!