Brother printer drivers on Debian Linux

Brother printers are generally considered pretty well supported on Linux. They publish Linux drivers and possibly even mention support on the product box. This is good!

Official drivers

From the Brother Australia website, on the "Support and Downloads" page for the printer I have you can choose Linux in the list of operating systems. From here there is a RPM and DEB download option. Finally there is a few options for download:

1. Driver install tool. A ~2600 line shell script which downloads and installs the drivers.
2. The driver packages directly.

It's great these exist at all, however while the script is updated quite regularly (last update was a month ago), the drivers are potentially quite old. For example I bought the "HL-L2305W" mono laser printer from Office Works, and the driver was last updated in April 2015 (now over 6 years old), and installs as an i386 package

I assume these are rarely updated after the product is launched.

Open source drivers

Some of the Brother printers may "just work" with default present drivers in base Debian (or distros based on it like Ubunutu)

However for the HL-L2305W I have at least, this was not the case.

Thankfully, for reasons I can't fully comprehend but very much appreciate, some people maintain printer drivers at the brlaser project.

These can be installed quite easily on Debian with a simple:

sudo apt install printer-driver-brlaser

Most of the printers don't require special drivers, so this supports a lot of the printers even if they aren't specifically mentioned. It's worth checking the brlaser Issue tracker to see if someone has already tested the printer you have.

You probably also need to make sure cups printing service is installed:

sudo apt install cups

Then also add the printer configuration, simplest way being the system printer configuration GUI:

system-configure-printer