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Re: brother printer/scanners

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On 01/01/2017 09:29 PM, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Sunday 01 January 2017 20:31:00 Jape Person wrote:
>
>> On 01/01/2017 07:38 PM, Joel Rees wrote:
>>> I got a Brother printer to work by installing both the debian
>>> packages from the repos and the deb from Brother's website, but the
>>> scanner still isn't being found.
>>>
>>> Running Wheezy.
>>>
>>> Would anyone care to tell me what steps they took to get scan
>>> functionality on their Brother multifunction printers?
>>
>> I imagine the exact process you want to follow would depend on the
>> exact device you bought.
>>
>> I just went through the process of hooking up a Brother MFC-9340CDW
>> (color laser with scanner, etc.) to my home network.
>>
>> Here's the deal. If you use either the CUPS localhost:631
>> functionality or system-config-printer, you will probably be able to
>> find a driver that will work for the printer portion of the device. I
>> found that the MFC-9320CDW (Note the slight difference in model
>> number.) Foomatic PostScript driver worked best among the open source
>> drivers available from the repositories for my particular printer.
>>
>> I'm pretty sure that nothing from the repositories will drive the
>> scanner portion of this device or any other multi-function printer
>> currently made by Brother.
>
> I'd argue that point. Brothers support for their stuff under linux may
> not be precisely what you expect, but they seem to at least have a
> stable interface.  Install their drivers, and you m,ay have to fine tune
> the colors or saturation (they seem intent on saving toner, but if you
> keep telling by way of cups settings to use a little more as you go
> along, you will eventually get decent color output.  As for the scanner,
> xsane found it and ran it the first time I tried it, with some stumbling
> due to tcp packet checksum errors, it would send the scanner 6 commands,
> they would be rejected because of checksum errors but the 7th attempt
> was successful.  This particular combo has its i/o interface buried
> inside the unit, burning up 3 of the 5 feet a usb cable is allowed, so
> rather than spending an extra $20 for a usb hub, (this places usb tree
> resembles a weeping willow tree already) I had a spare 10 foot cat5
> jumper so I plugged it into my switch and gave it a local address. I was
> badmouthing brother because of the checksum errors, but one day, after
> quite a few updates had been installed on this wheezy system, I noticed
> the delay was gone, and on watching a tcpdump, the errors were gone, and
> they have stayed gone.  So it wasn't brothers fault. The combo machine?
> an MFC-J6920DW, one of those monsters that also handles 11x17, scanning
> and printing.  For 11x17 prints, you would do well to build a chute of
> some kind to guide the paper into it from the rear, its a cast iron
> bitch to do it by hand even when using the guide tray I built.  Sorta
> weird, it does std portrait output in landscape, but it also feeds the
> paper in landscape so the paper comes out sideways.  The only thing it
> doesn't do is spit out the paper as fast as the propaganda said it
> could.

What point would you argue? I was talking about the drivers which can be 
installed through the CUPS web interface or through the 
system-config-printer application. I was simply stating that there were 
no FOSS drivers in our (Debian's) repos for the scanner portion of these 
devices. Nothing to argue about, is there? If you can point out an 
exception, then sane.org would love to hear about it. They don't list a 
single Brother scanner device as being supported without proprietary 
software.

>>
>> I'm not content to install their proprietary stuff to make the scanner
>> work, so I just use the thing as a printer and copier. If I really
>> need to use the scanner function, one of my wife's Android toys can
>> use the scanner via wifi, and then she can e-mail the resulting
>> document to me.
>>
> That, considering that with their drivers, it Just Works(TM) seems like
> cutting off your nose because it has a pimple.
>

It's what I choose to do with my systems. Do whatever you wish with 
yours, and I'll do whatever I wish with mine. Again, you're arguing 
about an *opinion* which I stated clearly was an opinion.

And their drivers don't "just work" without doing some pretty wonky 
stuff to the system. You post about enough problems you have with 
unusual configurations that I'd think you wouldn't begrudge someone else 
wishing to avoid that sort of thing.

I gave credit where credit was due, and acknowledged that the 
installation script did a good job of installing working drivers for all 
of the functions. I just didn't appreciate the way it went about the 
job. Look below in the paragraphs you quoted.

>> I did, however, test the proprietary drivers for the MFC-9340CDW on a
>> Debian testing system before yanking them off and reverting entirely
>> to FOSS.
>>
>> Brother provides a number of different ways to install the mixture of
>> open source and proprietary drivers they provide on the support site.
>> If you are in the least bit persnickety about the way installers work,
>> you won't like Brother's installers. They use a lot of dpkg
>> --force-install crap and stick stuff like 32 bit libraries onto your
>> 64 bit architecture so that you will see warnings scroll by and start
>> wondering why you bothered with this.
>>
>> The funny thing is that the worst of these installers, a script which
>> installs everything possible via download, actually does the best job
>> of getting all of the parts of the device to work -- assuming that you
>> don't make a wrong choice somewhere during the installation procedure.
>>
>> I tried installing just the scanner software from the proprietary
>> software along with the open source foomatic driver. That worked
>> pretty well, but only after some trial-and-error with the
>> instructions.
>>
>> If you do any of Brother's manual install procedures, watch out for
>> the typos in their instructions. Some of the mistakes in the
>> documentation are really, really ridiculous. Even an intern in the
>> support division should be able to write instructions that distinguish
>> properly between usb and network connections.
>>
>> Also, if you do install the Brother proprietary stuff, run debfoster
>> immediately afterward to confirm that you want to keep all of the
>> parts and pieces of the drivers and their libraries so that your
>> package manager won't try to throw it all away the next time you run a
>> full-upgrade.
>>
>> Good luck! Or just use the open source printer driver from the
>> repository and use your smartphone for scanning.
>
> For a far less secure way than I do it.

For a far less secure way than you do what? Scanning? You're stating 
that you know for a fact that using the WPA-secured wifi connection 
between a smartphone and an applet on the smartphone for getting a scan 
from an MFC is less secure than installing proprietary software on your 
computer to accomplish the scan? Is that really what you're stating? I 
wouldn't care to spend the time and energy that would be required to 
prove the point one way or another.

But I am sure of one thing, using the smartphone or tablet to get the 
scan doesn't install software outside the approved Debian repositories 
on my Debian Gnu/Linux systems.

I'm not Chicken Little crying about a falling sky. I'm just happier 
sticking with software and drivers for which the computing community has 
access to source on my critical systems.

I don't worry a lot about my wife's smartphone and tablet. I consider 
Android devices to be compromised from the start. She transacts no 
financial, commercial, or legal business on those devices. The Debian 
systems here, on the other hand, get used for lots of business that we 
just don't trust to systems loaded with proprietary software.

It's not a religion; it's a preference. And I always try to be careful 
to distinguish between fact and opinion. Hence my advice covered use of 
FOSS-only software, use of a combination of proprietary software and 
FOSS software using manual driver installation methods, and use of the 
installer script which still installs a mix but does the job with a 
fairly heavy hand (again, in my *opinion*).

JP

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brother printer/scanners Joel Rees <joel.rees@gmail.com> - 2017-01-02 01:40 +0100
  Re: brother printer/scanners Felix Miata <mrmazda@earthlink.net> - 2017-01-02 02:30 +0100
  Re: brother printer/scanners Igor Cicimov <icicimov@gmail.com> - 2017-01-02 02:30 +0100
    Re: brother printer/scanners Igor Cicimov <icicimov@gmail.com> - 2017-01-05 04:40 +0100
  Re: brother printer/scanners Jape Person <japers@comcast.net> - 2017-01-02 02:40 +0100
    Re: brother printer/scanners Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2017-01-02 03:40 +0100
      Re: brother printer/scanners Jape Person <japers@comcast.net> - 2017-01-02 07:00 +0100
        Re: brother printer/scanners Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2017-01-02 08:10 +0100
          Re: brother printer/scanners Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> - 2017-01-02 13:30 +0100
            Re: brother printer/scanners Jape Person <japers@comcast.net> - 2017-01-02 17:00 +0100
              Re: brother printer/scanners Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> - 2017-01-03 01:00 +0100
                Re: brother printer/scanners Jape Person <japers@comcast.net> - 2017-01-03 04:20 +0100
                Re: brother printer/scanners Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> - 2017-01-04 17:30 +0100
                Re: brother printer/scanners Jape Person <japers@comcast.net> - 2017-01-04 19:30 +0100
                Re: brother printer/scanners Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> - 2017-01-04 20:00 +0100
                Re: brother printer/scanners Jape Person <japers@comcast.net> - 2017-01-04 23:00 +0100
                Re: brother printer/scanners Nicolas George <george@nsup.org> - 2017-01-04 23:10 +0100
                Re: brother printer/scanners John Hasler <jhasler@newsguy.com> - 2017-01-05 00:40 +0100
  Re: brother printer/scanners Ben Caradoc-Davies <ben@transient.nz> - 2017-01-02 05:50 +0100
    Re: brother printer/scanners Joel Rees <joel.rees@gmail.com> - 2017-01-03 06:30 +0100
      Re: brother printer/scanners Jape Person <japers@comcast.net> - 2017-01-03 06:50 +0100
      Re: brother printer/scanners Joel Rees <joel.rees@gmail.com> - 2017-01-03 08:10 +0100
  Re: brother printer/scanners Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> - 2017-01-03 01:20 +0100
    Re: brother printer/scanners Jape Person <japers@comcast.net> - 2017-01-03 04:30 +0100

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