Brother printer drivers in Lucid are 2.5 years out-of-date

[Bruce Miller]

Binary package hint: brother-cups-wrapper-laser

I have compared driver versions in this package (and the related package brother-lpr-drivers-laser) with the driver dates listed on the Brother website (http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/bsc/public_s/id/linux/en/download_prn.html).

The drivers in the two packages in Lucid date from July 2007 (version 2.0.1-1). The Brother website includes drivers up to November 2009 (version 2.0.4-1).

The copyright implications of including these drivers in Ubuntu was discussed extensively in Bug 25966.

openprinting.org recommends using Brother's own Postscript drivers, at least with models closely related to my own recently-puchased HL-5370DW.

.deb packages are available directly from Brother's website; using those packages, however, carries all the customary disadvantages of going outside Ku/Ubuntu's own package repositories.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Fri Feb 19 23:43:58 2010
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
InstallationMedia: Error: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/var/log/installer/media-info'
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: brother-cups-wrapper-laser (not installed)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_CA.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-13.18-generic
SourcePackage: brother-cups-wrapper-laser
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-13-generic i686

[Bruce Miller (brm0423)]

since submitting above, have discovered following on Ubuntu wiki:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupportComponentsPrintersBrother

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

Hi. I am the one who created these packages for ubuntu. Unfortunately, as my last comment in the BrotherDriverPackaging page says, I was not, and I won't be able to continue this project. However, if anybody want to continue this project, I will be happy to provide some assistance.

I have to mention that all previous packages for Brother printers were made based on "pseudo-categories" of Brother printers + a bunch of drivers with no category that I called "extra". Finding a way to classify this in order to build correct wrappers for each driver really was a pain (some printer categories even share libraries while others don't!), my previous work on printer driver classification is available here : https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BrotherDriverPackaging .

While previous drivers were distributed in packages, it is not the case for new drivers in Brother website which distributes all new drivers individually. That completely breaks the old distribution model, which would probably requires all brother drivers packages to be merged together in one package in ubuntu repository.

In addition to that, the source packages are in fact scripts that generate the final wrapper files, not the files themselves! The ubuntu LPR packages needs to use a "sed hack" to modify binaries that have hardcoded path that does not respect debian FHS policies for packaging, and a bunch of workarounds (sometime from Brother website, sometime from ubuntu community) had to be applied to the packages in order to fix a lot of issue, but even with all this work, Brother drivers continue to present many issues. Because the LPR drivers are not opensource, that leaves the community with no possibility to fix the drivers.

The addition of all these points makes packaging of these drivers too time consuming for what I can do at the moment and while I thank Brother from taking care to provide Linux drivers, it is obvious that the drivers quality and the driver distribution is really problematic, but if anyone has enough courage, it was possible, and it's still possible.

It would also be a very good idea to do LSB packaging of these drivers, to make them available to all Linux platform, not only ubuntu, and to eventually have them proposed via cupsys itself. This could make ubuntu packaging not necessary. And scanner drivers could also be packaged eventually.

At the mean time, Linux users can still download .deb directly from Brother website.