MX Linux Forum

The L2390DW is eight years old. Have you checked the Brother site to see if they still maintain a driver for it? See here for the date of first availability:
https://www.pc-canada.com/item/brother- ... C7vPJXtdPm

I have no experience with Brother USB-only printers. For those with network capabilities, even if you have the correct driver installed, you may still have to set a fixed URI address for the printer.

BUT!

in order to do that, you may first have to fiddle with your router for your home network, to assign/reserve a fixed home network address for your printer. Once you have done that, you can set your Brother printer to this fixed address, from the console screen of your printer.

Then, in MX, you configure your printer driver [the configure printer window] to point to this URI.

asqwerth wrote: Sun Mar 16, 2025 1:07 am I have no experience with Brother USB-only printers. For those with network capabilities, even if you have the correct driver installed, you may still have to set a fixed URI address for the printer.

BUT!

in order to do that, you may first have to fiddle with your router for your home network, to assign/reserve a fixed home network address for your printer. Once you have done that, you can set your Brother printer to this fixed address, from the console screen of your printer.

Then, in MX, you configure your printer driver [the configure printer window] to point to this URI.

Correct

That is what I had to do for correctly setting-up my Brother printer as a Network Printer. It resides in my basement, and is connected to power and an Ethernet cable that connects to my router.

I recall having to fiddle quite a bit with the printer's menu settings until I found the correct setting to change the URI.

I will review my notes (which I always try to take, especially for stuff like this), and will get back to you (the person who had problems with changing the URI).

@reidun So, I didn't see that your question regards a USB connection.

I found my notes for setting-up a Brother Network Printer, so that doesn't really address your question, but I will upload my notes for anyone who is interested. I have altered my notes to remove personal information (IP addresses & such), and have tried to make it general for anyone. It gets a bit complicated between configuring your own router, CUPS, and the device/printer itself. So, here you go:
HTH

j2mcgreg wrote: Sat Mar 15, 2025 6:38 pm The L2390DW is eight years old. Have you checked the Brother site to see if they still maintain a driver for it? See here for the date of first availability:
https://www.pc-canada.com/item/brother- ... C7vPJXtdPm

Yes, that is what I meant in my first post when I said I used the Brother utility that installs all three drivers at once. Doesn't print. (BTW, they still provide a driver for my old MFC-8460N which is about 18 years old.)

Thank you @asqwerth and @operadude , your posts might both provide me some clues. When I get time later today or tomorrow, I will do some more tinkering and see what I come up with!

Keep in mind that Brother lasers will refuse to print if the drum unit has reached its preset EOL.

@reidun Good Luck !!!

j2mcgreg wrote: Sun Mar 16, 2025 2:22 pm Keep in mind that Brother lasers will refuse to print if the drum unit has reached its preset EOL.

It does print test pages from the printer console menu, so I don't think that's the problem. It also has a total page printed count of under 700 pages.

Going to give the above tips a shot now and see if I can get any headway.

Problem solved! No amount of anything I tried would result in anything but the message "Waiting for printer to become available" so I finally thought to fire up the windows partition and see if it would recognise the printer from the offical Windows printer installation tool, which it did not. So, looked at the actual USB port on the machine, and terminals were bent. (Why does it take loads of frustration to think to look at the obvious easy thing?) So my husband took it apart and removed the broken port from the circuit board and resoldered a port of an old Brother printer we had sitting around for part. Works like a charm with the Linux installation tool provided straight from Brother!