I had my Brother MFC-5890CN scanner/printer working with Ubuntu 10.*.
Now that I have upgraded to 12.04 LTS, the printer is still working but my scanner fails.
Ubuntu 12.04 is no longer supported but here is an answer for 16.04: How to get a Brother DCP-350C scanner working?.
To summarize the answer, first go to the Brother Printer/Scanner website. Then select your printer model:
Select the right product (Printer/Scanner). In the printer icon for MFC-J410W
, click the link Not your product? and a selection page appears:
The screen below is for the MFC350 printer/scanner which has a sub-menu for "DCP 3 Series" which leads to a specific model:
My printer is the fourth icon in the panel, which being 3 icons wide is immediately below yours. I'll select that and it has a sub-menu for "DCP 7 Series" which after clicking presents:
I'll click on DCP-7065DN. You would have already selected DCP-350C on the previous screenshot.
After selecting the printer model, you are asked for your OS. It defaults to Linux and ".rpm". The default is ".rpm" which stands for Red Hat or Arch Linux or something like that. Change the distro to ".deb" which stands for Debian which is really Ubuntu.
Above is a summary of the link. Click on the link for the full tutorial.
I found information that might help your problem from this link.
You could either run xsane
with root
or you may adduser <user> lp
. I tried and they both work.