MX Linux Forum

Hey reckon this is the right subforum but move it if needs be....

Brother DCP-7065DN laser printer/scanner/copier

Appears the driver I've been used to using- the Binary_P1 driver available via the Print Settings, is gone from fresh installs of MX 21.2 onwards. Would this be Debian's fault? Doesn't even list a DCP-7065DN any longer, it recommends a postscript driver for the DCP-7045N and that only results in spitting out dozens of blank pages when I try to do a test page print. Which is also what the Brother driver installer has always done (and so I use it only to install the scanner)- maybe I can go in via the browser interface and mess with my Postscript settings- PS is enabled- but I've always used the Binary_P1 driver in every install of Linux Mint or MX for forever now, until this 21.2 release. I had reason to want to do a fresh install and it's not there any more. I wound up reinstalling 21.1 and am running all the updates to get me back up to speed.

Given we had all those Debian updates with 21.2 I wondered if it had something to do with that?

(edited title slipped keystroke)

I have found the driver called "Generic PCL Laser" works well for black and white printing. Has worked for 2 different Brother MFC printers of mine when I want to print in B&W (I have a separate printer entry under which I use the actual Brother colour driver). It's in the database of drivers you can choose from when you "add a printer" in Print Settings.

But I do have to know how to set my device URI, because the predetermined network location in Printer Settings doesn't work.

I'm also not sure "Binary P1" describes a driver for Brother. I think that's just the general description of the Brother device as detected on your network by your system.

Brother does not seem to make a DCP-7965 according to their UK and USA websites. I am proceeding on the premise that you made a typo.

If the issue is that you need the driver it is here:

https://support.brother.com/g/b/downloa ... 7065dn_all

I have found Brother to be extremely Linux-friendly. I have had no problem at all installing Brother Linux drivers if you follow their instructions exactly.

I used to only buy HP laser jets but ever since that Carly F. woman destroyed QA at HP (and almost destroyed HP completely) their printers have been extreme junk. I have been very happy with my three Brother Laserjets and the toner is cheaper than HP plus I have had the oldest one for 5 years and only had to change the toner once after almost 3 reams of paper had gone through it.

Thanks for the replies, I do appreciate it but it's not that I can't get it to work- I did- it's that, where did what I was doing go?

mikech wrote: Mon Oct 03, 2022 1:34 pm Brother does not seem to make a DCP-7965 according to their UK and USA websites. I am proceeding on the premise that you made a typo.

If the issue is that you need the driver it is here:

https://support.brother.com/g/b/downloa ... 7065dn_all

I have found Brother to be extremely Linux-friendly. I have had no problem at all installing Brother Linux drivers if you follow their instructions exactly.

The title was a slip on my part hit the '9' instead of '0'- I've since corrected the title to 7065

Yes I use the Brother installer to get the scanner set up but I've never had my printer print correctly using the Brother-supplied driver. I've always used the one supplied with MX Linux and it has always been there and given me this screen or similar when I look for my network printer:

And I always select the option that I have highlighted in the screenshot, and it's done.

.... but not anymore. Starting with a fresh install of MX 21.2 you get this:
Then it takes you to this:
and you see it recommends a different model Without a listing for the 7065.

And you see that connection
LPD/LPR queue 'Binary_P1' is not an option anymore.

and then I get it spitting out blank pages like a slot machine payout when I try to print the least little thing. Which is what happens when I use the Brother Driver Installer from Brother.

Now, KDE is a little different. KDE previous to 21.2 takes me to a selection screen where I still have to manually look up in the list of printers, BUT it shows 'DCP-7065DN' in the list and it shows LPD/LPR queue 'Binary_P1' as an option and then everything's fine.

asqwerth wrote: Mon Oct 03, 2022 1:29 pm I'm also not sure "Binary P1" describes a driver for Brother. I think that's just the general description of the Brother device as detected on your network by your system.

I don't know, except that it's listed as a Service under Network Configuration:
So sure maybe I can try that generic PCL. I'll mess around with the Postscript settings. But my issue is that something happened between 21.1 and 21.2. Someone dropped the exact printer driver from wherever they're kept. Either MX isn't finding it, or it's got something to do with that ginormous Debian update that brought about the upgrade from 21.1 to 21.2.

This is only on a fresh install. You can start from 21.1 and follow the updates to 21.2 and it doesn't appear to lose the fact there's a exact DCP-7065DN driver out there. Now if I deleted my current printer then tried, I don't know but I'm not doing that I've messed around with all three DE/WM versions of 21.2 and 21.1 to figure out it's definitely a revision number issue and not a Fluxbox or XFCE or KDE thing. I'm worn out from creating USB live sticks and testing. I'm not breaking my install again. Just that it irks me that when a MX 22 comes along where you pretty much ought to do a fresh install then I'm going to be fighting my printer when I feel as if I shouldn't have to be- driver was there, now it's not. Sure, it's a decade old but it's not my old NEC beast of a dot-matrix from the 1980s, either. The DCP-7045N is still listed and it's a dozen-year-old printer.

I got around it for now, and may find workarounds when MX has the next major revision. But I still wanna whinge at somebody for it- it's either on the MX end or the Debian end just point me in the right direction :D

Sorry to hear about the problems with Brother installer. Perhaps it worked so well for me because my laser-jets are not multifunction. Years ago after I took my HP inkjet out to the driveway and modified it with a sledgehammer (that felt SOOOO good!!) I had problems installing the Brother Linux driver for my first Brother B&W laser-jet. I got it done but I found that it was not straight forward and it had to be done exactly right and the four files had to be installed in the correct order and I finally got it to work, but not until I ran a bunch of network commands in the CLI (YUK!).

With the latest laserjet, a color one, which I bought just recently (2021), I found that they had improved their driver to a single installer file that was a deb file which you just run. A few minutes later a fully functional network printer! No CLI needed! But no fax, or scanner or anything else. It is just a printer. We have dedicated scanners and fax machines which is the better way to go if you have the space and the resources. We are running a business from our home office.

I am running plain vanilla MX 21 XFCE pretty much unmodified. It should be noted that the Brother Linux driver is not as robust as the Windows driver which has many more bells and whistles (I had to install it for my wife's computer). But everything is networked so if I need the bells and whistles (which is just about never) I just samba over to her computer and print from there.

mikech wrote: Mon Oct 03, 2022 9:16 pm Sorry to hear about the problems with Brother installer. Perhaps it worked so well for me because my laser-jets are not multifunction. ...

Not true for me. My first Brother MFC had all its functions working fine on all my distros, lasted 9 years, and only died because the physical parts (the hinge connecting the top half to the bottom) broke.

My second MFC is fine too.

For MX, I use the printer driver from Brother for colour printing (install the deb file), and Generic PCL for B&W (from the database in Print Settings). But after installing, I then edit the printer entries in Print Settings to fix the printer location/URI. That's because my home network reserves a specific location for the printer.

I use the brscan4 driver from Brother for scanning. Again, after installation, I configure the driver so it knows where the location of the scanner is.

@rickyraccoon , I am sympathetic, but it's hard to know how else to help. What I do know is that the "auto-detect printers" thing that first showed up in MX19, is hit and miss. Sometimes it works, sometimes it looks like it works but doesn't actually. The fallback is always to install the actual driver (or another one that works from the print database) and then edit the print entry accordingly. [ADDED: oops, another fallback is to go to the autodetected print entry in Print Settings, and if you know the location of your printer, you can change that autodetected location -- some long gobbledygook -- to your actual URI]

Binary P1 is the manner of connection [see your own screenshot] as detected by the system. Again, just because this shows up, doesn't mean printer is detected/connected correctly.

Note that this is the case in all my distros, not just MX/Debian. Auto detect is hit and miss.

mikech wrote: Mon Oct 03, 2022 9:16 pm I had problems installing the Brother Linux driver for my first Brother B&W laser-jet.

You ain't kidding. When I first got this one, they didn't yet have that bash-able deb file and I remember how much of a PITA it was to get the scanner working. I was using Linux Mint at the time and it handled the printer side fine but of course I had to do the CL heavy lifting to to get that scanner seen by the system. Now it's a lot easier, except that for whatever reason the printer side of the driver installation never works right for me and whenever doing a fresh install (I like to fiddle with my machines way too much) I've always relied on Mint or MX to get that set up. Mint still does but like I say, suddenly it's missing from MX since 21.2.

asqwerth wrote: Tue Oct 04, 2022 12:28 am Binary P1 is the manner of connection [see your own screenshot] as detected by the system. Again, just because this shows up, doesn't mean printer is detected/connected correctly.

Note that this is the case in all my distros, not just MX/Debian. Auto detect is hit and miss.

This is the first time I've ever had a problem. Note that, it's detecting the printer with no problems. It sees a printer, it knows what the printer calls itself. Just not giving it the driver I'm used to. And why my exact model should be missing now from the list of Brother printers is a mystery. What I just really want to know is if this was something that changed with Debian. That way I know to expect it forever more.

Well, I'm going to see if I can get the actual driver from Brother to work, that way I'll know what to do the next time I do a clean install. re-installing from the 21.1 ISO and slogging through something like 265 updates to get it back up to 21.2.1 wasn't fun. Going to run that Brother installer again as a second printer, then I'll go in and fiddle with the printer's settings via browser interface. I've suspected that my printer's settings are wonky, else why would I have problems with their own driver? That DCP-7045N looks like it's a 7065 sans scanner so why wouldn't that postscript driver listed not work? So I'll start out fiddling with the Postscript settings. Maybe there's something set wrong in there.

That's going to be a bit of a pain- I'll have to keep only a couple sheets in the tray unless I want to burn through reams of paper trying to get it to work right. Not amusing when you try to print a Debian test page and it spits out two or three dozen blank pages.

Instead of using browser interface (the CUPS page), why not edit via the Print Settings GUI? If you double click on the icon of the printer entry in question, you can edit location, etc. You can even try different drivers from this page. Just click on the "Change" button to the right of "Make and MOdel" (after you have installed the driver deb in question).

So that line is the driver line; not the Binary P1 thing.

This is the first time I've ever had a problem. Note that, it's detecting the printer with no problems. It sees a printer, it knows what the printer calls itself. Just not giving it the driver I'm used to. And why my exact model should be missing now from the list of Brother printers is a mystery. What I just really want to know is if this was something that changed with Debian. That way I know to expect it forever more.

[ADDED] I don't know if anything changed in Debian (the recent large update was to pull in all the security updates from Debian accumulated over the past month). But it might have.

This situation you find yourself in has happened to me before in Manjaro when I was still on my previous MFC. First the original Brother driver (built from AUR) worked, then one day after an update it didn't. By that time, there were open source drivers for that same printer in the printer driver database accessed in print settings. I tried it and it worked. Then one day, the open driver didn't work again. However, after I fixed a URI location for my printer and edited said printer entry to point to the location, it began working again. That is the solution that works for me now on every distro.

asqwerth wrote: Tue Oct 04, 2022 12:18 pm Instead of using browser interface (the CUPS page), why not edit via the Print Settings GUI? If you double click on the icon of the printer entry in question, you can edit location, etc. You can even try different drivers from this page. Just click on the "Change" button to the right of "Make and MOdel" (after you have installed the driver deb in question).

Well, accessing the printer directly (I'd rather do that than fiddling with the front panel and little LCD display) I can change like Postscript settings and stuff and I can't see any of that from the Print Settings dialog in the OS. I'm going to install both the Brother-supplied driver and that 7045 Foomatic/Postscript drivers as additional printers and then toggle through all the Postscript filters in the printer firmware, for starters. I have no idea what I'm doing so I'll be learning as I go and I'll start with the simplest things first and go from there. Also might behoove me to log into Windows and see how Uncle Bill's folks have it set up look at the description for the printer connection in there see what it says. Meh.

Have you also tried looking for the open printer here:
https://openprinting.org/printer/Brothe ... DCP-7065DN

@fehlix, one of the MX developers created a script for installing Brother print drivers, which can be found here:

https://forum.mxlinux.org/viewtopic.php ... 75#p447475

j2mcgreg wrote: Tue Oct 04, 2022 1:13 pm @fehlix, one of the MX developers created a script for installing Brother print drivers, which can be found here:

https://forum.mxlinux.org/viewtopic.php ... 75#p447475

Well that simplifies it a bit. I tried it out and it does cut out a few keystrokes The driver didn't work, of course- unless I just happen to like blank pages being spat out... but for doing the scanner side yeah that would be more convenient.

Even though it's still a mystery as to why the Brother installer version 2.2.3-1 doesn't give me a usable printer, I'm marking this 'Solved' because my original question is 'Where did the MX-supplied driver go?'

And to that, well there's this:

asqwerth wrote: Tue Oct 04, 2022 12:37 pm Have you also tried looking for the open printer here:
https://openprinting.org/printer/Brothe ... DCP-7065DN

Which leads ultimately to the free driver brlaser. Which is asserted to be in many distro repos. And well, so it is in the Stable Repo as Which of course I already have installed, since I used MX 21.1 to fresh reinstall.

But that got me wondering, why do I see it in the repo, but when I tried to do my reinstall using 21.2.1 didn't the Print Settings find it?

So I made me a bootable USB with Fluxbox 21.2.1- the same ISO I'd installed, that started this whole mess with 'Where's my Printer'?

Well, I'll swear on Linus Torvalds' grandaddy's grave with my hand on the owner's manual to my first computer that before today it wasn't seeing the printer driver in the Print Settings dialog- I have posted the screenshots proving it- but now, doing the same exact thing, it works. Now it works. The USB stick sees it when I go to install the printer, just as if the past few days hadn't happened. Whatever was borked, has unborked.

Now, that doesn't explain why the Brother installer version 2.2.3-1 don't work for me. And I'm still mildly interested in that. But since my original question was 'what happened to the printer driver in MX Linux?', well, it's magically there again. So I reckon this is solved. I wanted to know why did it disappear from MX Linux and well, dang thing's reappeared. Go figure. Thanks everyone- especially that openprinting link because that's what got me wondering if things had magically righted themselves. Apparently so. And I know for future reference what printer package to go looking for.

An addendum. It's acting as if it's going to install the brprinter driver but still kicks you to the 7045 option. But the solution is still just a matter of going in through Package Manager and installing the brlaser driver from there- then when you go to install the printer it does what's expected. Why previous versions didn't require manually installing the driver via Package Manager, and they don't now, I don't know- but the point is that it's a simple matter to grab the brlaser driver via Package Manager before adding the printer.