A while back I somewhat impulsively bought a floor-model Brother MFC-7365DN printer that was on the clearance shelf at Sam’s. I say somewhat impulsively because I needed a new printer and I was seriously looking at the Brother MFC line, but I didn’t know much about this particular model and hadn’t, prior to walking in to the store at least, completely decided on that line of printers. The deal was too good to pass up, though, and the printer has proven itself to be a great decision.

One thing that I didn’t know (and didn’t really think much about) going in to the purchase was Linux support. As it turns out, Brother has great support for Linux, but only for x86 devices. Their Linux drivers are proprietary and they don’t offer source code, so printing from ARM devices is a challenge. There’s plenty of discussion online about which Gutenprint drivers usually work (none of the recommendations I found did more than push out blank sheets of paper, if anything at all) or using QEMU to emulate x86 hardware (which was reported as being extremely slow, so I didn’t try).

I generally don’t print from my Raspberry Pis directly but, as we use Google Apps more and more at work, I find myself wanting to use Cloud Print more often. I really wanted, as I had done in the past, to set one of my Pis up as a Cloud Print server, but without a printer driver that wasn’t happening. In fact, I even went so far as to create an extremely kludgy, but surprisingly effective, solution that involved an always available SSH connection (using autossh and a dynamic DNS service) between a remote x86-based VPS and one of my Pis, with a tunnel to my printer. I then set up Cloud Print on the server and used that as my workaround…until this weekend.

I was browsing some packages in Synaptic when I decided to search for “Brother.” I’m pretty sure I did this before with no luck, but this time I found a package, printer-driver-brlaser, described as a “CUPS filter driver supporting (some) Brother laser printers,” which appears to be distributed by the OpenPrinting project. One of the printers listed was model DCP-7065DN–a model number quite similar looking to my printer’s. On checking out the specs for the DCP-7065DN, it looked to be pretty much the same printer as mine, less the fax capabilities, so I installed the package, set up the printer in CUPS (which was already installed from previous attempts), selecting “Brother” as the make and “Brother DCP-7065DN” as the model, and printed a test page…successfully!

I should note that CUPS found my printer automatically, but I couldn’t get it to work from the discovered selection. Instead, I manually configured the printer’s address to be socket://IP_ADDRESS:9100 (with my printer’s IP address in place of IP_ADDRESS, obviously). The driver didn’t give me an option to set the duplex default, so I’m not sure if I’ll be able to do two-sided printing or not (I haven’t tried printing anything longer than one page yet), but it’s not the end of the world if I can’t.

Just thought I’d share my experience as there seem to be lots of frustrated Brother owners trying to print from ARM devices out there.