Installing Brother HL-1212 W-Fi Mono Laser Printer in Debian Stretch (Gnome)

 [Update: This post is old now, but still getting a few hits. In Bookworm just install printer-driver-brlaser - no need for the Brother driver now.

See this post.]

 

I have never been a big fan of inkjet printers. My first clogged up regularly and required the print heads to be cleaned. Eventually It gave me a message that it had reached the end of its service life or similar. A web search told me I needed to open and clean out the ink reservoir. When I did, I found a small sponge where ink is deposited during the cleaning process- full of about two ink cartridges' worth of (very expensive) ink.

My last printer was better in that the cartridges contained the print head, so fewer blockages. However, the cartridges were horribly expensive. I tried some non-genuine ones, but experienced banding in prints with one cartridge, and another two were rejected by the printer shortly after installation. (I read somewhere that the manufacturer had updated printer firmware on some models to reject non-genuine cartridges, and as the printer was internet connected, that's a possibility with mine.)

Having paid about £25 for a set of genuine inkjet cartridges a while ago, I was more than somewhat annoyed to find that the printer had stopped working when I tried it recently. The print heads seemed to be blocked. Running the cleaning cycle improved printing a bit, but not enough to be useable (and no doubt wasted a lot of that expensive ink).

Rather that fork out another £25 quid to check if indeed it was the cartridges, I decided to have a look for a cheap laser printer. And indeed they are cheap these days. £45 gets you a USB model and £50-55 or so a wireless model.

I saw the Brother printer in the title of this post on sale for £49.99 and it looked good. Unlike other models from other manufacturers it comes with a full toner cartridge- not just a half-full trial cartridge.

But was it going to be usable in Linux? Well, the Brother web page had Linux drivers for download, and a Google search brought up some posts from various forums from people who had got it working in Linux, so I snapped one up.

I will relate the procedure I went through first, but this won't be a good procedure to follow because it didn't work at first- I'll recap the correct procedure at the end.

First I tried plugging in the printer, turning it on, and connecting it to the computer. (You'll need a USB computer cable. The manufacturer obviously assumes that everybody has one lying around from a previous printer purchase- in this case correctly.)

A pop-up appeared to say that Gnome was configuring the printer. That sounds good! Then another one appeared to say a driver was needed. I clicked OK to look for it, but a message appeared to say that a driver hadn't been found, with a link to a web page explaining it might be proprietary software.

However, the printer was available in the printer dialogue, although it had defaulted to a driver that didn't match my printer model. I tried printing a test page, but characters in the text were deformed.

Obviously I needed to install the driver for my printer from the Brother website.

Before doing that, I wanted to see if it was possible to set up a network connection for the printer, as it has Wi-Fi. I did this by using the WPS button on my router, then pressing the Wi-Fi button on the printer for a few seconds. The printer connected to the network and I was able to find its IP address from the router. Once I'd done that I was able to access the printer control page by tying the IP address into my web browser.

Using the menus I could enter the router password (Network/Wireless/Personal) and give the printer a static IP address.

Without a WPS button, I suspect it may be possible to access the control panel using localhost, although I didn't test this out. If you don't have WPS, open CUPS, see if the printer has an IP address, and type it into a browser, as described in step 5b in this page on the Brother web site.

So, printer successfully network enabled, I went on to install the printer driver.

(First I removed the non-working brother printer from the Printers dialogue.)

Brother has a very easy to use installation tool for Linux drivers for its printers. I should say easy to use if you are OK with working in a terminal, but not difficult to run even if you aren't. Here is the link:

Brother driver install tool.

Read the notes before downloading because there is some important information. For Debian Stretch, it's the following:

Requirement ia32-libs or lib32stdc++ is required to be installed.

In Stretch it seems to be lib32stdc++6, which also brings down some 32 bit architecture (the drivers are 32 bit, I think).

[Update 23/1/2021: The information above is obsolete as the installer has been updated and now installs the required 32 bit libraries automatically.]

That done, I downloaded the tool and followed the steps in the guide. Having set up my printer with a static IP address, at the end, where it says...

When you see the message "Will you specify the DeviceURI ?", For USB Users: Choose N(No) For Network Users: Choose Y(Yes) and DeviceURI number.

I entered the IP address I had given the printer, and the tool installed the printer as a network printer.

There was this warning at the end, but I think it's only a warning about a missing folder in Sane, and as the printer doesn't have a scanner, I don't think it's critical.

ls: cannot access '/etc/udev/rules.d/*.rules': No such file or directory

After the process finished, a test print produced perfect results!

So recap, if you are installing the printer and want to use the Wi-Fi connection, first try to set up the printer on the network, then run the Brother driver installation tool with the IP address you gave the printer.

To conclude, some pros and cons of the printer.

Cons:

• Only prints in black and white, in case you missed the word "mono" in the title.
• Still has my pet hate of desktop printers: the external paper tray. If you don't use the printer for a while, the paper sits in the open gathering dust, until the next print, when that dust is drawn into the machine.

Pros:

• Cheap
• Works with Linux
• Fast, good quality, dry prints
• come with a full toner cartridge