Using Brother MFC-440CN in Ubuntu on a network through my router.

PWND!

I run Ubuntu, my wife, try as I may, continues to use XP. She has no reason to and could swap to one of the many great Linux distributions available but she is stubborn and I am scared of her so it stays as it does - its another story for another web page!

Page one of http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=105703 was of a lot of assistance, Brothers help page at http://solutions.brother.com/linux/sol/printer/linux/linux_faq-2.html#60 also assisted.

All in all it was successful.

At first I was unable to use the CUPS drivers from brothers site for the MFC440CN, for some reason I could only use the 420CN CUPS driver which wasn't a big problem I thought as then number was close enough. I also used the 420lpr driver. I was not successful in getting it to work so I hacked on.

I then did a bit more reading and found that I need to install csh using apt-get.

I ended up having 3 in there which I guess was a result of my continued trying to get things to work.

It was at about this time I noticed that I had to create the folder /var/spool/lpd/MFC440, for some reason when double clicked the downloaded packages from Brother (either CUPS or lpr, can't recall) it would say it installed but alas when you looked at the terminal history in the Synaptic package manager window it complained about not being able to create these folder - YMMV as I am not sure that this folder is even required for successful operation.

Eventually I was able to install the 440CN CUPS and LPR. Basically you go to Brother site at http://solutions.brother.com/linux/en_us/index.html and download the CUPS driver as well as the LPR driver for the printer you have. Double click the .deb packages you get and Synaptic should do the rest.

I then went into the CUPS web interface via my browser (http://localhost:631/) and the clicked on Manager Printers. It was here that I changed the the URI for the printer to lpd://192.XXX.XXX.XXX/binary_p1 (insert the IP address you assigned to your printer of course) .

I printed a test page and you know what - it worked!!!!

I bit of persistence and bloody shot eyes and I got it to work. This is a truly great outcome for us. We now have a fully functioning networked printer that my wife and I can print to using our wireless laptops.

The MFC-440CN has an added bonus of being a scanner, fax and photo copier plus some memory card ports - the scanner and fax are gimmicks in my mind and most likely not able to work without heaps of messing about in Linux - I would hazard to guess they work fine with XP but who gives a shit! It looks like the memory card ports use FTP to get the data off them which is kind of cool.