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 orsudo 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