Where could I find 64bit drivers for my Brother MFC-7420?

Question

Is there any location where i can download the 64bit driver for my Brother MFC-7420 Laser- printer?

I'm using Ubuntu 11.04 since a few weeks. I searched many places and tried a lot of downloads, but nothing will work properly.

Answer 1

Brother's site is a little wonky. They have a great page for drivers but I can never find it from the main site. The page you want is here:

http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/bsc/public_s/id/linux/en/download_scn.html

I installed these for my printer (MFC-665CW) by downloading the .deb (64 bit in my case) and installing them with:

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

After that I was able to install the printer by opening the Printing application and clicking "Add Printer".

I just got the scanner working as well. I found out the files that were installed by the package:

dpkg -L brsane2

Then by trial and error found this magic command:

cd /usr/local/Brother/sane
brsaneconfig2 -a name=my_scanner model=MFC-7420 ip=xx.xx.xx.xx

...where you can pick whatever name you want, the model number should match that of your printer, and the ip address is the ip address of your printer.

After that I opened up Simple Scan and scanning Just Worked.

Answer 2

Printing worked out of the box for me so I'll describe how I managed to get scanning working (the scanner being connected to the PC via USB).

1. Download and install brscan2 64bit from here: http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/bsc/public_s/id/linux/en/download_scn.html

2. Scanning should work if you're running your scanning app as a superuser ("sudo gimp" in a terminal for instance). However, this isn't a permanent solution so you should open the /lib/udev/rules.d/40-libsane.rules file and add the following lines right before "# The following rule will disable ...":

   ATTRS{idVendor}=="04f9", ENV{libsane_matched}="yes"

For the more detailed howto (the one I followed myself), see the brother website (or "Brother Solutions Center" as the call it): http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/bsc/public_s/id/linux/en/instruction_scn1a.html