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The usb driver project is currently kind of outdated as brother supplies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.
- Use the buttons on the MFC to select addresses
- Not install software on every PC
- Centralized maintenance of the address list
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)