Brother MFC Linux Driver

This webpage is under construction and may not have everything up to date.!!

About

This site is home to the Brother MFC driver project for both the Parallel and USB ports.  The objective for this project is to get the printer, scanner and fax functions working in Linux.  
The usb driver project is currently kind of outdated as brother supplies sane drivers for the MFC devices on their website. The old index page of this site can be found here. In discussion with Dmitri I (Ruud) more or less hijack this project for some new functionality: network scanning.

Status

Network

The project at this pages never focussed on the network scanning functionality. However the newer MFC like the MFC7820-N have a nice network scan functionality.

Problem

The network scan functions of the MFC are kind of clumsy. They require special software to be installed on a seperate PC that controlls the scanning process. As such it is not possible to enter an email name on the MFC itself and use it to send a scan to a person.
As a result one needs to have a seperate machine next to the MFC or install the MFC software on a larger group of machines.

Hairy big goal

Turn the MFC into a network scanner that can be used to directly email to the persons in your office.

Network Technics

Source for networkscanner

Is in the CVS under brothermfc/sane-driver/scanner
currently no makefile is supplied: just type "make scanner"

USB

Currently the print feature of the printer is working using the USB printer driver. As for the printer driver itself, you need to select the correct ghostscript driver according to what printer you have.
The scanner functionality is currently being implemented and will hopefully be completed soon.  Since I (Franklin) am not that experienced with USB programming, it might take a while to get completed. After the USB interface is completed, a sane driver will be written to implement the sannning functions.

Faxing has been implemented using a Perl script and Efix programs.  This implementation is only compatable with MFC's compatable with the FCL language.  Please refer to the documentation below for uses and limitations of the script.

Parallel

The parallel driver is at least suppose to support printing through the parallel port.  As for the scanning and fax, I don't know much about the status since the other maintainer (Dmitri) is working on it.  When I get the current status, I will update this section.

Documentation

Printing

Currently there is no documentation related to this subject here.  Please look at linuxprinting.org for printing help.

Fax

faxlanguage.txt This document explains the basics of the Brother FCL fax language.
faxprint.txt This is the documentation for the faxprint.pl script.

MFC Setup

There is no information about this subject at the moment.  Please refer to your Brother MFC manual for details on machine setup.

Source

faxprint.pl A perl script used to generate FCL code for some Brother MFC's

Logs

Informational log files for development.
faxcontrol.log
faxorg.log
faxparse.log
faxtest.log
printer.log
scanner.log
stardust.log
usbdevices log
usbdrvs log

Links

LinuxPrinting.org
Sane Webpage (Linux scanning)