Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2011 15:35:35 -0400 From: Alejandro Imass <ait@p2ee.org> To: FreeBSD <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Brother MFC-8890DW printer Message-ID: <CAHieY7Tzg95t9aMFp3HmadkC3ZJ4epTTre7FjWV34a7wpAdMoA@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <20110914145631.56603a09@scorpio> References: <20110914145631.56603a09@scorpio>
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On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 2:56 PM, Jerry <jerry@seibercom.net> wrote: > I have an opportunity to pick up a Brother MFC-8890DW printer at a > fantastic price. There is a Linux driver for CUPS available at: > <http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/bsc/public_s/id/linux/en/instructio= n_prn1c.html> > > This is obviously not a high end unit; however, I feel I could > probably get fair results out of it. It is not a "color" printer so > it will only be used for normal b/w documents. I plan to hook it up to > my router using a wireless setup on my home network. > > I am not worried about my Windows machines since it will obviously work; > however, I want to know it this printer works as designed with FreeBSD. > I doubt that the FAX function would be used at all via FreeBSD, if it > is used at all. I have a dedicated FAX. However, the copy and scan > functions would be important. > My 0.02: For printing you will most likely get IPP printing a generic PostScript driver to work with this printer, and obviously by using the provided PPD by Brother. In this case FreeBSD CUPS server will act as a client to the printer which really is it's own print server. If you get it to work with IPP you shouldn't really need a driver as such, just the appropriate filter to work (i.e. the PPD file). Scanning is probably going to be harder. All front-end sane programs support the "net" driver but I think that is limited to saned, the networked version of sane. I have used saned and I scan remotely with saned but the actual sane driver is running on the machine that has the device physically attached to it. Again in your case, the scanner itself provides some scanner protocol (i.e. the scanner is the scanning server sever) and it's probably not open nor compatible with the front-end sane applications. Sane as such has poor support for Brother: http://www.sane-project.org/sane-mfgs.html#Z-BROTHER But, many times these multi-function machines are OEM by others (Samsung, Xerox, etc) especially if the scanner is ADF maybe the hw is actually Canon or Fujitsu. So maybe the chipset is actually compatible with other sane drivers. On the other hand, Brother seems to be quite Linux friendly: http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/bsc/public_s/id/linux/en/index.html >From what I saw real quick it could be quite possible to get the Linux Brother network scanner driver to work on FBSD/Sane by means of Linuxator, even the "network" scanning: http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/bsc/public_s/id/linux/en/instruction_s= cn1b.html So resuming: - It's very probable that a CUPS server (actually client in this case) will print on this network device. Probably via IPP using the provided PPD by Brother or generic Postscript I think will work for sure. - The networks scanner seems to be supported by Brother on Linux, IMO if you set-up sane at the linuxator level and you get scanimage to work inside linuxator, it will be a breeze to enable saned and scan natively from sane on FBSD. In this scenario, the native front-end sane programs (scanimage, xsane, etc.) will talk to a saned network driver daemon in Linuxator and this one in turn will talk to the networked scanner. --=20 Alejandro > -- > Jerry =E2=9C=8C > jerry+fbsd@seibercom.net > > Disclaimer: off-list followups get on-list replies or ignored. > Do not CC this poster. Please do not ignore the "Reply-To" header. > > http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe@freebsd.o= rg" >
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