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I'm looking to install drivers for my "Brother HL-2170W" network printer. I can't seem to find the correct driver on the Brother site. Any help would be appreciated. I'm running on Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS x86_64.

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  • I don't have a detailed answer for you in the context of Ubuntu, never actually having dealt with its printing support (!), but on other systems with Brother brand printers, I've had excellent luck with the CUPS drivers (which should be available for Ubuntu). Jul 29, 2010 at 1:19

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This guy at: http://mikebeach.org/2010/06/ubuntu-and-brother-hl-2170w/ says there is a problem in 10.04 with a fault in the cups drivers, at least for the HL-2170W.

Text worked okay but printing graphics took a long time. This was true for me. I followed his advice precisely and now my pdf files are printing great. I have only tested one page, probably should test a few more complex graphics but for now I'm a very happy camper. So I wanted to share the wealth.

Lots of other people on the ubuntu forums seem to be complaining about slow printing so I suspect that it is not only the HL-2170W printer driver that is bad. But step 8 in his instruction list will need to be changed, I think for printers other than HL-2170W.

Hope this helps.

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I've (mostly) solved this problem, by doing something simple. I went into printer properties and changed the "Device URI". I chose "LPD/LPR Host or Printer" and used my ip address instead of one of the network printers Ubuntu suggests.

This solves my general printing slowness as pages go to the printer immediately. The only exception is PDFs that still take a while to print.

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I don't have any experience with this printer, but from what I've found it either "just works" when you plug it in using USB; if you'd like it to communicate over a network it needs to be configured and there is only software for Windows or Mac. This means you'll need to either use a Windows or Mac computer or VM to configure it, and then be able to use it from Ubuntu.

From UbuntuForums.org:

I have that printer. WHen hooked up with USB, it just works, however, the printer does not have a control panel built in and requires Windows or Mac based software to configure it for use with a wireless network. I used Windows XP in VirtualBox to configure it, the printer configuration in Ubuntu was able to see it on the wireless network and connected just as easily as it did via USB. Its a great printer, just sucks that you have to use windows to configure the network...

(source)

From another thread I found a link to a PPD file that can be used to install your printer, however those posters were using Ubuntu 8.04, although it could be worth trying.

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  • I've got it configured through Ubuntu by installing the printer from the PPD file from Brother -> Brother-HL-2170W-pxlmono.ppd, for network printing. Printing anything takes around 1-3 minutes, even for basic printing. I thought this was a driver issue and wanted to get the correct driver from Brother - which would hopefully solve the slow printing problem.
    – ssanj
    Jul 28, 2010 at 23:45
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Without any specific knowledge of this printer -- does the printer support Postscript?

If so you can try a generic ps driver.

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