Brother All-in-One Printer Installation and Setup

Introduction¶

Printing and scanning with an all-in-one Brother printer is possible on Linux thanks to 3rd party Brother all-in-one printer and scanner drivers.

Info

Procedure tested with a Brother MFC-J480DW.

Prerequisites and assumptions¶

Rocky 9.4 Workstation
sudo privileges
Brother all-in-one printer and scanner

This guide assumes your printer is accessible from your workstation either with a direct USB connection or LAN (Local Area Network). Connecting a printer to your LAN is outside the scope of this article.

Adding a printer in GNOME¶

Open Settings
In the left menu click, Printers
Notice the banner at the top of window that says "Unlock to Change Settings"
Click Unlock and enter sudo credentials.
Click Add

After clicking Add, Settings will start scanning for printers. If your printer does not show up but you know its IP address on your local area network, enter the IP address manually. Connecting your printer to your home network is beyond the scope of this article.

A Software window launches that attempts to locate and install printer drivers. Generally, this will fail. You will need to go Brother's website to install the additional drivers.

Downloading and installing the drivers¶

Brother Driver Installer Script Installation Instructions:

Download the Brother MFC-J480DW Printer driver bash script
Open a terminal window.
Go to the directory you downloaded the file to in the last step. e.g. cd Downloads
Enter this command to extract the downloaded file:
```
gunzip linux-brprinter-installer-*.*.*-*.gz
```
Get superuser authorization with the su command or sudo su command.

Run the tool:

bash linux-brprinter-installer-*.*.*-* Brother machine name

The driver installation will start. Follow the installation screen directions

The installation process may take some time. Wait until it is complete. Once finished, you can optionally send a test print.

Scanner support¶

Xsane is a scanning utility that provides a graphical user-interfacce to make scans. It has packages available from the appstream repository requiring no additional configuration.

sudo dnf install sane-backends sane-frontends xsane

The xsane GUI looks a little intimidating but doing a simple scan is straightforward. When you launch xsane a window with a button exists where you can Acquire a preview. This will take a preview image of a scan. Once read to scan click the button Start in the main menu.

For a more comprehensive xsane guide read this article by the University of Cambridge Faculty of Mathematics

Conclusion¶

After installing the necessary Brother drivers and xsane you should now be able to print and scan on your all-in-one Brother printer and scanner.

Author: Joseph Brinkman

Contributors: Steven Spencer